Going back to the original proportions, and having ~35,000 representatives could solve a lot of the money in politics issues.
By comparison, I think most of us have had the experience of being in a conversation with a small group of people (or even one other person) and wanting to say something but not being given an opportunity to do so without seeming rude.
This could have other advantages as well. No reason why any one bill should block any other bill; anything with N/2+1 upvotes is passed by the House. It would also be possible for representatives to remain in their home districts among their constituents.
Don't take the above too seriously, I'm sure there are holes. Just a thought experiment in my brain right now.
If 51% of districts are 51% yellow while 49% are 100% pink, yellow wins.
With a second level, you can run that game twice, and 25% are enough to win.
This is possible if you eliminate congressional districts altogether and have people "subscribe" to a representative. It removes the problem of a single congressman "trying" to represent constituents with widely disparate views equally, and abolishes gerrymandering in the process.
Like YouTube, you would end up with superstar representatives that would capture an even larger share than the most powerful do now. And the fact that they wouldn't even have a home district would mean that they would be accountable to absolutely no-one besides those who helped them achieve their superstar status. So yes, you would have "your rep" but he would be like a small you-tuber compared to PewDiePie—4k subs vs. 100,000,000.
I'm guessing the numbers won't be known until after the voting is done, meaning a lot of effort will be spent finding out where the line is at.
I kinda want to simulate it for a few elections to see what happens, but there isn't any sufficient simulation.
50 states. 300 representatives in each state's assembly, almost all power devolved to those states. 15000 representatives. OK, it's not 35,000, but I doubt that makes much difference.
How? When people complain about money in politics issues these days, they're usually complaining about 3rd party money. I don't see how having 100x more representatives would reduce 3rd party money. It's not like it's hard to target 3rd party ads to small geographic areas.
Candidates are far more concerned about 3rd party money than direct donations these days, because 3rd party spending is unlimited. Quid pro quo is not necessary because it's all done in public. You don't need a secret meeting with a lobbyist to know if the NRA likes your position on guns. Just watch the ads.
Of course not every House member has to worry about this; in fact most don't. Most of the big spending on House races is concentrated in the few districts that everyone expects to shift the balance. This would still be true in a House of 35,000. While most races would probably get less expensive, there would still be a small set of "tipping point" races that would attract most of the effort and money.
Quite a lot of House races are on "auto pilot", politically--that is, there's not much suspense about which party's candidate is likely to win. This is in part because of gerrymandering that produces districts favorable to one party vs another.
Tiny districts would be like gerrymandering on steroids. It wouldn't take much fancy geometry to produce a map in which the vast majority of House races remain easily predictable. And it is the marginal (unpredictable) races that atract the bulk of the big spending.
You could probably get the same result by blocking funding external to the district and killing citizens united. And/or shorten campaigns to 60 days so they just don't cost as much. And/or, provide public funding and election spending caps.
I don't think that trying to scale out of it would be that effective but I see what they are getting at. My guess, is that would raise the inequality of the playing field again as the richest would be able to spin up an organization to manage 10k reps, decide whose relevant who to fund, and so on, people who didn't have lobbyists before won't be able to afford that even if the per rep cost gets cheaper, the total influence cost will rise and price additional people out of the market.
What makes you say that? Hell at 10,000 constituents you borderline don't even need to run ads, just go door to door, personally.
EDIT: Although I suppose the tactic could at that point be turned to buying voters more directly. Spend a ton of money on something that benefits everyone in the district and make it clear that it'll keep coming only if they vote for your candidate, and you might have the same effect.
As much as I like the idea of proportional representation, I don't think getting 35,000 people to agree on anything is a viable solution.
Perhaps a better approach is one that decentralizes power as much as possible, giving more voice to local constituencies versus the Federal government -- and similarly, giving power to continuously smaller communities such as county vs. state, city vs. county and so on and so forth.
An improvement on top of that is having the superior legislature write framework laws that more local communities can elect to follow, should they prefer that over drafting their own legislation, for whatever reason. While this isn't applicable to every legislative issue, the theoretical argument for this approach is quite compelling¹, at least according to one UVA Law professor²
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1. http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/hein/kitch/70va_l_re...
2. https://content.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/ewk/1180712
Even if we upped it to 5,000-6,000 reps, it would be a huge improvement.
Wyoming has a total population (census 2010) of about 563,000. And about 98% of those are citizen. WY has 3 electors, so roughly 187,000 citizens per elector.
Citizen in WY have roughly 3x the voting power as citizen in CA, due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... 2 - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-ci...
Which is the point, so as to prevent high population urban centers from dictating everything to the rest of American that doesn't share their values.
>due in large part to a system designed to appease slave-holding states 200 years ago.
I assume you're referring to the 3/5 Compromise here. While true that this was a consideration, the underlying reasoning is still sound. It makes no more sense for San Francisco to rule over Sac City Iowa than Sac City Iowa to rule over San Francisco. That's the beauty of the system the Founders designed. Otherwise you just drift further and further toward Direct Democracy, which is a euphemism for "chaos".
This is intended behavior. IIRC it was to address the question of whether slaves counted as members of the population for the purposes of determining number of congressmen.
if we want to take money out we need to remove the ability of the political parties from spending money on who they chose and require them to fund a set number of candidates equally. Not all candidates as its obvious you can get some kooks, but as it stands now elections are more decided by the party than the voters. the parties decide who gets to run for the seat and it becomes big news when a maverick usually with their own funds upsets this quagmire.
so please by all means try to minimize the money influence elections but understand that most people's views are being heavily manipulated by operatives of both parties to make sure that the only money in politics is money they have full control over.