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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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We need a bigger House. If we have 10,000 Representatives split proportionally, we wouldn't be squabbling over how to best gerrymander each little slice.

Pros:

  • Less money being raised - representative spends more time governing than fundraising.
  • Representatives would be "Friends of Friends," the ratio would be back to 30,000:1 citizens:representatives, which is where it was at the start of our country. It would be easier to know your representative and for the representative to actually represent a geographic area.
  • Much harder for parties to whip/control the House, which would lead to less gridlock/conformity.

Many other questions are along similar logistical lines: how would voting work? Would they use clickers? What if the clickers break? How could C-SPAN get the cameras in? Wouldn’t a large House end up more under the sway of leadership than ever? It’s like nobody’s ever seen a parliament of a few thousand people!

In fact, we know how to run a legislative body consisting of several thousand people, because Americans do just that all the time. I’ve even participated in one!

The 2014 Minnesota Republican Party state convention had 2,020 voting delegates at its opening. I was an alternate, but ended up serving as a voting delegate. It was a pretty thrilling day! The GOP senate endorsement was closely fought, and we went to ten ballots over two days. (I had to drop out after the first night.) We followed Robert’s Rules of Order, which work just fine for huge crowds, with standard convention rules. We cast paper ballots and handed them to trusted ballot-counting teams. The House floor “debates” you see on C-SPAN are mostly on-camera onanism to an audience of six or seven people, but, at the MNGOP convention, we fiercely debated the merits of each candidate among ourselves—not so much on mic, but person to person. The candidates courted us. Their surrogates courted us. Candidate teams were back in their offices just off-site, printing up supportive flyers and (as the losing candidates grew desperate) nasty slanders for rapid distribution on the floor.

It was a blast. In the end, the body reached a collective decision. Our candidate was not my first choice, but he was far from my last. Similar conventions happen everywhere in the country, year in and year out, for both parties, without major drama or disaster. The House can run just as smoothly! This is what a republic looks like!

Combined with an amendment about making districts boundaries as close to their geographic center as possible, it would create a more fair system overall.

I like it! My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it, preferably so tall that you can't see the top from the bottom, and give whoever is taking a turn speaking a levitating platform to stand on that can move around the chamber while they talk.

Joking aside (although I do really like the idea at first), how would various committees work? Just equally large?

Maybe a traditional declaration by each speaker. Something along the lines of 'I am the Senate?' and then a vigorous folk somersault.

My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it

An open air amphitheater perhaps? One in which we can host bloodsports that better suit the brutal nature of politics in form and function. Besides aesthetics weather adds a new X factor. The arena would also compliment the return of state-sanctioned duels that keeps the massive lower house orderly. We can call it the Polisseum.

The Sergeant at Arms is badly in need of an update to modern law-enforcement standards, RoboCop style.

The article goes into it a little, but right now we already have 9,000 congressional staffers. It already takes about 10,000 people to run congress, but only a small percentage is elected.

The hope is that if races become smaller, each congressman needs to fundraise less money and spend less time campaigning. Smaller races will be won in the tens of thousands instead of millions. They will have more time to actually run the country and can decrease staff accordingly.

Committees are already divided into subcommittees. It's not unreasonable to divide that even further, into sub-subcommittees.

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