Timothy Birdnow

And here I thought the number of legislators we have now is a bit much...

The House is already too unwieldy and we are blowing too much money on their comfort and enjoyment. All adding members would do is cost the taxpayers more. We would not get better representation.

Notice how this is now coming up after the GOP decided to gerrymander to rebalance the House after decades of Democrat gerrymandering? The Democrats have little more they can do so they now want to expand Congress (just as they want to expand the Supreme Court) to offer them new opportunities to steal elections and falsely obtain power.

The argument for this is that the population has increased (more than doubled, in fact) since this law was put into effect and thus we have just half the representation we once enjoyed. That is NUMERICALLY true, perhaps, but advances in technology make our representatives more responsive to us as they can be more easily contacted than in the old days when they either had to hang around their districts except when Congress was in session or simply ignore their constituents, or read snail-mail. Now a person with a problem can zip off an e-mail to his representative who can get a reply back to you in little time.

So to say our representation is watered down ignores how much faster communications are now.

And it's not like you have to deal with the Rep. in the first place; you are going to deal with his staff and there is no limit on how large a staff a representative may have. There is nothing to suggest in any way that our republican system of government would be improved in any way by increasing the size of Congress. But there is a lot of reason to worry about it.

More hand mean more mischief. And more money.

Yale historian Mark Peterson spills the beans

on the real motive:

So to have "democracy" we need to get rid of the U.S. Constitution, according to this leftist fellow at Yale. (All I can think about here is Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island and his ultimate condemnation "must be a Yale man".)

As they article points out, expanding the House and abolishing the Senate is a policy advocated by the Democratic Socialists.

This article, after saying some on the Right support expanding the legislature (and yet what they quote is a Hillsdale College Prof who simply said it CAN be done, not that it should) goes on to point out reasons why it shouldn't:

Another member of Hillsdale’s political science faculty warned of a similar trade-off.

"The Founders argued that creating a numerous legislature would be disastrous because it would ‘incapable of transacting public business,’ as the Anti-Federalist Brutus put it. A large assembly can’t deliberate or debate, and there are too many disagreements to work out,” Hillsdale College professor Joseph Postell told the DCNF.

Postell is a former visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

"James Madison warned in the Federalist papers, increasing the size of the legislature would make it ‘more oligarchic’ rather than more democratic, because in order to get anything done, rank-and-file members would give up much of their independence and be directed by leaders,” Postell said. "We see this today, even with only 435 members in the House: it’s the committees and the party leaders that run the House, rather than ordinary individual members. I think the Founders would worry that increasing the size of the House would exacerbate these problems rather than fix them.”

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In other words being a legislator becomes a mere sinecure, a dream job where you don't have to do anything and you let the Party do the thinking for you. Reps would be just figureheads who enjoy the perks and show up to vote as their leadership tells them and little more.

Grow government - be it the legislature or the bureaucracy only makes government less responsive and more dictatorial.

What this fails to realize is that, in the end, the American People are the true legislators, the ones who ultimately steer policy. Our elected representatives are supposed to do just that - represent our interests. But if we have too many cooks in the kitchen we wind up with representatives who have little to no influence and thus cannot fulfill that mission. So instead of being conduits of OUR will they become tools of the Party bosses.

My view is we should be cutting the size of the House, not expanding it. The larger a government body the less it truly represents the People, and the more it represents itself or business interests that keep the members in power. It's easier to hide corruption when you are Unum e pluribus, hiding in plain sight.

A smaller House with more visibility makes for a leaner, more honest government.

Take the Roman Senate, for example. Originally, during the Republic period, it numbered about 300. In 81 B.C. Sulla increased that number to 500. Julius Caesar expanded it to 900 (to pay off his friends and water down their influence) although the first true emperor Augustus cut it back to 600. (Augustus was in firm control of Rome and could afford to cut the number back.)

The point is Rome was decaying and the Senate was expanded at the same time. Coincidence? I suspect there is a correlative link.

If we were to expand the House we would be falling into the trap laid by the radical left. Don't fall for this.

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