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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.

I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.

A while ago I kicked around a concept of political representation that hinged on dunbar's number

Basically: You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

Every group, let's call it a "century" after the Roman military unit, is a member of a higher level group of 100 centuries (call that a "meta-century" for now), and each one elects a representative into the meta-century. Just like individuals, the representative can choose to make their century a member of a different meta-century, if that meta-century is willing to accept it. The meta-century chooses one representative into the meta-meta-century, and so on until you have one president.

Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.

I have no idea how well it would work but it would ensure that every single person is contained within a political unit below dunbar's number, which I think is a good property.

You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

It might be slightly more practical to say:

  • A normal-size group comprises 71–140 people.

  • An undersize group comprises 51–70 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either merging with another group or taking on new members individually.

  • An oversize group comprises 141–200 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either splitting into multiple groups or bleeding off members individually.

I'm glad this was the biggest problem you could find with this proposal lol

house of representatives having 1,000 members

Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.

(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)

Small City

Ackchually, according to the United Nations you don't hit "city" status until 50,000 people, so this would just be a mid-sized town.

Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.

I don't see why roll call votes are necessary. Just use an electronic tabulator like they used to poll the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I am sure we would end up with some kind of electronic solution, but it's still something that would have to be built. Congress currently has electronic voting for bills but that currently has a rather limited number of options (Yes/No/Abstain). Currently any Representative-elect can say basically any name as their choice for Speaker of the House. I don't think it needs to be anyone nominated in advance nor even any Representative-elect. Do you just give everyone a text box and hope ~5k people all type the correct name together? Do you constrain options in the voting system? Interesting to think how those discussions might play out.

I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.

I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.

Most business is conducted in committees, but virtually every rep has committee assignments. With 11k representatives, I could easily envision a situation where the vast majority of reps do very little except vote to organize the House and handle constituent issues.

I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.

Recursive sub-parliaments?

Imagine the committee appointment drama.

I've done the math, and if we kept up with the original intent, we'd be close to 1776 congressmen right now.

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