Enlarge The House • Thirty-Thousand.org 🇺🇸

The Founders intended for our House of Representatives to be substantially larger by now. The fact that it isn't is the root cause of all of our problems. Few people realize that the very first amendment proposed for our Bill of Rights, which was never ratified, was intended to ensure that the House of Reps would forever grow along with the nation’s population, as explained here… thirty-thousand.org/article-the-fi…

Think about it ..🤔 Maybe the real divide in America isn’t left vs right anymore… Maybe it’s everyday citizens vs a political system that stopped listening to them years ago. What do you think? 🇺🇸 #250_Revolution

The problem is not the voters. The problem is the choice of candidates that the political duopoly offers the voters! That's why a plurality of the eligible voters don't bother to vote at all. We need a healthy multi-party system. For that we need a significantly larger House.

Primary voters will always vote for the worst humans that they can find. You can pretty much set an atomic clock to it.

@RevRotation @GeneDun42000611 @seanjwestwood Exactly: Making the House bigger would also make the Electoral College bigger. And the bigger the EC, the more equitable it becomes with respect to interstate parity and overcoming the small-state advantage… thirty-thousand.org/blog/fix-the-e…

@30000dotORG @GeneDun42000611 @seanjwestwood Because of the marginal difference in district sizes from state to state the eCollege now malfunctions when the vote is razor close. Had the House of Reps continued expanding with the population—as intended—the electoral college would affirm the popular vote—every single time.

There is no magical cure to polarization, but offering fantastical plans without evidence is a dangerous approach to governance. 5,000 members of the House? Really? usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

The painfully obvious solution for eliminating gerrymandering of congressional districts is to substantially enlarge the House, resulting in much smaller congressional districts. In addition, that would bring the House into compliance with the Constitution's one-person-one-vote equality requirement.

These are major problems in theory - except, in practice, Congress can resolve them all. Congress can pick some criteria and exclude others, and just set a fairness threshold that can't be exceeded. Redistricting tradeoffs are also often overstated. See papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf….

And the founders also realized that a large republic to endure, the House would have to grow with the population. That is why the very first amendment proposed for our Bill of Rights, which was never ratified, was intended to ensure that the House of Reps would forever grow along with the nation’s population, as explained here… thirty-thousand.org/article-the-fi…

@30000dotORG Not a day goes by where I don't feel gratitude.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: "Of all human governments, democracy is the most unstable, fluctuating, and short-lived."

@dan85895877 @JEQuidam @OldeWorldOrder @grok, reference the thread above and then answer this question: Are the states and the US federal government "republics" or "democracies"? Please explain your answer.

@JEQuidam @30000dotORG @OldeWorldOrder no, see my pinned thread, a republic is a democracyy

@JustinTHaskins @HeartlandInst @USATODAY @usatodayopinion For more information about the benefits of substantially enlarging the House of Representatives, visit our website and follow us here on X. We have been advocating for this since 2004.

Want to end gerrymandering, out-of-control lobbying, and the need to spend millions to win congressional races? There’s a radical solution—and it’s something the Founders agreed with. Read the @HeartlandInst plan in today’s @USATODAY and @usatodayopinion. usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

@darthgently @JustinTHaskins @StopSocialists @HeartlandInst @USATODAY @usatodayopinion You raise a lot of good questions. A few of them may be answered by this article… thirty-thousand.org/blog/a-distrib…

Interesting. You could to do a part two that looks at various ways proponents of a 6k+ member house imagine how that house would function. I’m trying to imagine how all those voices get heard when in session. Would it become more internally hierarchical? Like the reps would elect reps and the repreps would do all the talking on the floor? I think we might require AI to sort through all the proposed bills such a large body would generate. I’m not against the idea, I’m just doing a thought experiment template I apply occasionally: if I were a fiction author trying to portray what would I write? How would I make it plausible and make sense on a daily and monument to monument basis?

@ChristianLindke @seanjwestwood The intended version of the would-be first amendment specified a minimum House size of one Representative for every 50,000 people. That is the size which we advocate for.

This won't influence polarization at all, but it does interestingly echo the original First Amendment (which was rejected) to the Constitution which had the House grow as the population grew. From a "close to the public" perspective 800k per district is pretty remote. From a collective action perspective 5,000 is pretty cumbersome. archives.gov/founding-docs/…

@Nolan_Mc @seanjwestwood Having 330,000,000 people "represented" by 435 career politicians is really the dumbest possible idea of them all. The Founders intended for the House to be substantially larger than it is.

@seanjwestwood This is the dumbest idea in an area full of dumb ideas

Not only that, but with only 435 Members, our House of Representatives is in egregious violation of the Constitution's one-person-one-vote equality requirement. It should be substantially bigger to enable the congressional districts to be equally sized nationwide, explained here… thirty-thousand.org/one-person-one…

@seanjwestwood I’ve always thought freezing the House wasn’t in the spirit of the Constitution. It artificially inflated the power of the small states, which is what Senate is for.

The founders expected to go that high. Federalist 55 contemplated there eventually being 6,000 to 7,000 Representatives. That was not a random number. It was derived by applying the 1:30,000 representational ratio (repeatedly promised in the Federalist Papers) to Ben Franklin’s prescient population growth model (which was widely cited at the time). And that goal was later memorialized by the very first amendment proposed for our Bill of Rights, which was intended to ensure that the House would forever grow along with the nation’s population, as explained here… thirty-thousand.org/article-the-fi…

@seanjwestwood The number isn’t a serious one. Nobody I know who’d have recommended enlargement a few years back would go that high.

@seanjwestwood @markovitis This article explains why substantially increasing the size of our House will effectively eliminate the ability to gerrymander in such a way as to disadvantage or advantage any voting bloc on a STATEWIDE basis, even with single-member districts… thirty-thousand.org/blog/ai-analys…

@markovitis I agree. It is just throwing stuff against the wall.

Note: This interview of Tulsi Gabbard by Shawn Ryan occurred on Sept. 16, 2024, nearly three years after she left congress.

Tulsi Gabbard explains why being one of an oligarchy of 535 effectively makes you royalty: “It is very easy for people to get sucked into the swamp in Washington. Maybe this is not what they were looking for when they ran for office, but immediately you were treated like you were something special. Red carpets are rolled out, special access, VIP treatment, fancy parties, people kissing your ass every freaking day.” It wouldn’t be this way if our House of Representatives was as large as the founders intended! (Interviewed by @ShawnRyan762)

@RileyTopping This article explains why substantially increasing the size of our House would effectively eliminate the ability to gerrymander in such a way as to disadvantage or advantage any voting bloc on a STATEWIDE basis… thirty-thousand.org/blog/ai-analys…

“Gerrymandering is not simply the product of partisan greed. It is a predictable consequence of a broken electoral system that rewards lawmakers for manipulating district lines whenever they can.” usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

Here's a simple thought experiment: What if each district contained only one person? (I.e., direct democracy). There would obviously be no gerrymandering. Now increase it to 2, 10, 50, 500, 5000, etc. Though the small districts’ boundaries can be manipulated, it is not possible to gerrymander them in such a way as to advantage or disadvantage any particular voting bloc on a STATEWIDE basis. Of course, it is very easy to gerrymander districts containing 600,000++ people. What is a good maximum congressional district size? We're advocating for the solution proposed by the first congress: 50,000.

@30000dotORG @leedrutman Enough with this talking point. The only constituency too small to gerrymander is a constituency of size 1. Districts of only a few thousand people are gerrymandered all over the country.

Ban gerrymandering. It sounds so obvious. So simple. Of course we should do it. Except, there’s just one problem. What is a gerrymander, anyway? You may think you know it when you see it. But are you so sure? How would you measure it?

This article explains why substantially increasing the size of our House will effectively eliminate the ability to gerrymander single member districts in such a way as to disadvantage or advantage any voting bloc on a STATEWIDE basis… thirty-thousand.org/blog/ai-analys…