Scale Matters If You Want To Be Represented In Congress

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript –If we had one representative for every 30,000 souls, which was the vision of the framers and was honored all the way up until the 1910 census, if you have one representative for every 30,000 souls in the United States, you would have approximately, I believe the number is around 8,700 members of the House of Representin’.  Now, where are 8,700 members of Congress going to meet?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Next up, Roger in North Carolina.  Hello, Roger, how you doing?  You’re on The Mike Church Show.

Caller Roger:  Good morning.  It’s nice to talk to you.  I was wondering if you could put on your seventh grade history teacher hat and answer a question for me.  I’ve asked some people and I haven’t really been able to get an answer or any comment because people don’t really understand what I want to ask and I think probably you could.  The question is this: There are 435 people that represent us in Congress, then we have the 100 senators.  The last time they made any adjustment to it was back about 100 years ago when there were about 90 million people, right?  We have three times the amount of people and they never changed how many people represent us.  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Mike:  Well, Roger, I’ve talked about this on the Sirius XM Patriot Channel for damn near the entire time it’s been the Sirius XM Patriot Channel.  The answer to the query is no, it’s not a good idea.  It shows how out of scale and how workable an in-scale federal government would be.  If we had one representative for every 30,000 souls, which was the vision of the framers and was honored all the way up until the 1910 census, if you have one representative for every 30,000 souls in the United States, you would have approximately, I believe the number is around 8,700 members of the House of Representin’.  Now, where are 8,700 members of Congress going to meet?  The answer to the question is they’re not.  That’s unworkable.  That would never work.

So, either A, you have to have a House of Representin’ that doesn’t represent.  Of course, it represents the corporate interests and represents those that are in the pay and play the corporatism game.  Or B, you would have to do something along the lines of establish regional federations or confederacies or whatever you want to call them.  You might have the Northwestern Congress, Southwestern, South-Midwestern, Mountain State Congress, Gulf State Congress East.  AG, think of the new congress with 87,000 members as your college football Division 1A divisions.  You’ve got the Big Ten.  You’ve got the Pac-10.  What’s on the East Coast there?

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AG:  ACC, Big East.

Mike:  Here in the South you have the SEC East, SEC West.  What else is there?

AG:  There’s WAC, Mountain West.

Mike:  Western Athletic Conference, right.  What is Boise State, for example?  Are they in the WAC?

AG:  Are they in the Big East now?  I think they were going to join the Big East but they might have backed out.  It’s the most confusing thing in the world now.

Mike:  Roger, just imagine that the federal version of the Congress meets in divisions probably very similar to the way that athletic divisions in the NCAA are divided.  That is far more workable and far more responsive to the people and to the body politic than the current representative form.  There is no way, it is an impossible task for any member of the House to properly represent the wishes of up to 790,000 people.  That is not representative.  You would be an executive or governor or a president over a population mass that large, not a representative.

So there’s a group out there, and I bet this gentleman is probably pecking out an email to me right now — as soon as I receive the email, I will tell you what the name of the group is.  There are people out there that want to restore the Congress.  Even they say, though, we can’t have 8,000 members.  But you can.  You see, you’re missing the point.  The whole edifice is so out of scale.  Human scale matters.  Scale matters.  Scale matters in every human endeavor and it always has, unless it comes to the national government of the United States.  Why you worried about scale?  Because scale matters.  Scale makes things responsive to stimuli.  In this case, you want your government, especially the House of Representin’, to be responsive to the stimuli of the wishes of the constituencies.

Just imagine that in a city like New York, there are, in the five boroughs, seven or eight million people.  Let’s say it’s seven million.  Just divide the seven million by 40,000 per representative.  I’m going to do the math.  You’d have 175 members of Congress just to represent New York.  Is it possible, nay, is it probable that there are going to be districts formed in New York that are not going to be the districts that elect Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton to the United States Senate from New York?  You bet your sweet bottom there would be.  You can do the same exercise in other major metropolitan areas and already you can see the benefit of it.  You’ve just diluted the representation to make it so that if you go to Mordor and screw up, you don’t go back, which is how representative government is supposed to work.

Thank you for the call.  Great question, and one that we need to have an honest and open discussion about.  We should not be afraid to discuss this, no matter how much anyone demonizes or vilifies the term secession or decentralization, which is what I just described to you.  Doesn’t it sound attractive to you?  Does it not sound like it makes your sum of the corrupt evils that currently manifest themselves and actually are the dominant method of doing business inside the national legislature?  It sounds like it to me.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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