Jonah Goldberg elects himself the President of a Confederacy of Dunces

Montana population density: Fields of GOP green

In his latest assault on Constitutional thinking, demography, and common sense, Jonah Goldberg says that if we just expanded the number of members of the House of Representatives, we’d be living in a great republic again:

So how big were these liberty-threatening districts? How tiny was the potentially oligarchic House? The districts had no more than 30,000 people, yielding 65 representatives. Under today’s apportionment system, the “ideal” congressional district is 700,000 people, with some districts reaching nearly 1 million. Montana, with a population of 958,000, has just one representative, but each of Rhode Island’s two districts has about 530,000 people.

There is, of course, an important principle here, and if all of Montana’s residents were black, it would be easier for everyone to see it. Montanans’ votes don’t count as much as Rhode Islanders’ — in fact, a Montanan’s vote only counts for about three-fifths of a Rhode Islander’s. That America’s slave population was counted by the same ratio under the original Constitution is usually cited, rightly, as one of the document’s greatest sins. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi last month hopes to force Congress to remedy the status quo’s assault on the one-person, one-vote principle by increasing Congress to as many as a paltry 1,761 members.

Beyond principle, there are practical reasons to expand Congress. For decades, presidential candidates have promised to change the “way Washington works.” But once elected, they’re soon captured by their own congressional parties, which are in turn beholden to the “old bulls” and constituencies rooted in interests outside their districts.

A Congress of, say, 5,000 citizen-legislators would change that overnight. Would it cost more money? Yes. But today’s huge staffs could be cut, and perks and pork might even be curtailed by using the old chewing gum rule: If there’s not enough for everyone, nobody can have any.

Term-limit activists have the right idea — getting new blood in Washington — but their remedy is anti-democratic. The trick is to swamp Congress with new blood and new ideas. Want more minorities in Congress? Done. Want more libertarians? More socialists? More blue-collar workers? Done, done, done.

via We Need a Bigger House by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online.

The first insanely obvious and completely ignored problem with Jonah’s argument: our legislative branch is bicameral. We have 50 states, which each elect two senators, and they water down every bill the House of Representatives passes. So shall we have 100 Senators moderate the work of 435 House members, or 5,000 House members? Without a more radical constitutional reform that did away with the Senate as currently constructed, you can pump as much new blood to Washington as you want. Most of it won’t make it to the brain.

Second, Montanans are not discriminated against relative to Rhode Islanders. Montana has no large cities – the biggest is the Billings metropolitan area with about 180,000 people. Providence, Rhode Island’s capital and largest city, has a metropolitan area of about 1.6 million. It makes more sense that a state with a large metropolitan area and an outlying hinterland should be represented by two people than it does for a state that is all hinterland to have more representation. Montana is mostly hinterland with a couple of small dots of population density.

Now in the event that Montana has a population explosion, the state’s Congressional representation should increase. And it could after 2010. That’s why we have a redistricting process linked to the Census, which has doubled the size of Arizona’s House delegation from 1983 to 2003. Iowa, which had 11 members in its delegation in the 1930s, now has only 5.

So what is Jonah really saying? He’s saying that large metropolitan areas with high levels of population density have too much power in Congress. And he’s saying this because on balance, places with higher population densities send more Democrats to Congress.

The scheme Jonah is imagining – about 5,000 House members, or basically 100 members per state – would require that the existing political parties effectively draft people to represent large swaths of their states where no one lives. I’m not sure if this scheme would be on a per county basis, or if it would mean that the slender-sized city of Billings, for instance, would get more representation than Montana’s Petroleum County, population 436. But the precise effect of Jonah’s idea, regardless of the specifics, would be to increase the amount of representation of sparsely populated parts of America relative to the large metropolitan areas where a large proportion of the country actually lives.

Why could Jonah possibly want that? Well, the Republicans of Montana would probably be able to send a larger slate of their fellow party-members to Congress. The Democrats’ demographic advantage would rapidly be transformed.

And here’s where Jonah’s argument slides into the kind of fascism that we saw last week from John “America would be better off if women weren’t allowed to vote” Derbyshire. Derb was saying that women send the wrong kind of people – Democrats – to Washington. Jonah is saying that if we could just send more of the right kind of people – effectively Republicans – to Congress, we’d be better off. Again, fascism.

Gold star, Jonah, for finding another way to mainstream ideas Robert Mugabe would endorse into our public discourse.

Update: I left out the other theoretical effect of this – if we preserved the Electoral College in its current configuration, Montana would go from having 3 votes for President to 102! The GOP would love that electoral math!