Being that 2008 is a presidential election year, I recently found myself looking for transcripts of the speeches given by the candidates – as I like to remove myself from the dramatical pauses and blinking-sign-lead applauses and get down to what is actually being said. Upon doing so, I stumbled across a website that sparked my curiosity. As a conscious, informed, and concerned citizen, I have been an avid writer to my representatives since I was in junior high school. I have watched as the letters changed from paper and pen to e-mail to the now widely used electronic form straight on the rep’s website. Unfortunately, with this transition came increasingly less personalized responses. Although they come much faster now, often hours or a few days after my initial complaint, er.. ehem, suggestion, they are completely soulless and only pertain to my concerns in that I checked the box “Energy Policy” before I began writing. In fact, my father and I once wrote completely different letters, explaining different aspects and details of the same subject, and received the same word-for-word response. Yes, I must admit, I no longer have to wait 3 months to receive a scrawled e-mail reply, but at least then I knew my voice was being heard. It is with this feeling of fear that my country is slipping from my hands before my eyes, that I am so far removed and out of touch that even when I take the time to write I am not heard, of growing apathy among my generation towards our government, that I take this time to inform you of the reason why you and I are feeling this way.
In the writing of the Constitution, the Founding Father’s (obviously) developed a two house system to rectify the complaint about state size versus equal representation. The House of Representatives is supposed to be based on the number of citizens in a given state. In Article 1, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, it is written, “The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand,” meaning the Founding Fathers idealized an electorate size of about 30,000 people per House representative. Our local representative to the House is Lynn Woolsey, who currently serves both Sonoma and Marin counties. According to the 2006 census, Marin and Sonoma counties have a combined number of registered voters of 378,803. This means there should have been 12 representatives in the House, not 1. How can this be, you ask? For some reason, in 1929, Congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act to cap the number of representatives in the House at 435. Why would they do that? I have no idea. Although being an historian with plans to investigate this much further in due time, I currently have not found any compelling reason for Congress to have passed this act other than that the literal “House” – the room where the House Rep’s meet to discuss and vote on issues - was getting too crowded. But should historical preservation of the House’s meeting site take precedence over representation? In fact, England’s House of Commons and Germany’s Bundestag – both the equivalent of our House of Representatives – both have more representative members than the U.S. House, despite their populations being about 16% and 27% of the U.S., respectively. It is my opinion that by capping the number of House Representatives, our own government has counteracted the original intent of the 2 House system – one of equal representation, and one directly proportional to population – and we are starting to see the long-term effects of this decision in the way things are happening today. There are many questions and concerns that arise in the reader of this new information that I do not have space or time to answer in this article. So, I will point you to your answers, where I found them, at www.thirty-thousand.org. It is my personal belief that our system has been broken by legislature and is getting increasingly more corrupt, despondent, and far way from the values of the American people. If you believe as I do, this issue cannot be more pressing and important than now, in the wake of the inauguration of another president. Although the election of the figurehead of our nation and a third of the balance of power is important, once the flash bulbs have burnt out, the styrofoam columns have been packed away, and the inauguration has taken place, life will return to the hum and lull that it has been for the past several decades, regardless of who gets elected. Where Congress continues passing 600 page acts of which they know little about, allocating monies to hometown projects in order to secure themselves another 2 years, and racking up our national debt. And, in the off-chance that we are stirred from sleeping in our cozy little materialized comfort-driven middle-class suburban beds by hearing about something that Congress has done that’s upsetting, our concerns are forwarded to an answering machine and replied by an android who didn’t read our letter in the first place. We have all heard the phrase “Knowledge is Power.” Now, you have knowledge, but it will not become powerful unless you do something with it.
