According to stories here, here and here, in addition to the 535 elected members of the US Congress, there are about 10,000 staffers under various classifications who are hired by these office holders to assist them.
The average staff budget is said to be $1.5 million, which is in addition to the $174,000 annual salary of the elected representatives and senators themselves.
While the latter costs the taxpayers upwards of $93 million annually, the former is upwards of $800 million annually.
In other words, we willingly spend close to $1 billion in tax dollars every year for congressional representation which is pretty much universally despised.
And about five times as much to elect it. A CBS News/New York Times poll in October found just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, but someone, somewhere, is pretty happy investing $5 billion to elect the right people. And "the right people" end up with net worths ten times that of their constituents.
Maybe it's time to change this.
How about following the constitution for a change?
Article 1, Section 1 of the constitution stipulates that representation "shall not exceed one for every 30,000." By that reasoning we should have a US House today with 10,000 representatives. Instead we have 435, thanks to the Republicans in the 1920s who simply refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census and fixed the number of representatives at the then current levels in 1929 through legislation.
The constitution wasn't amended. It was ignored. And today Republicans would claim the mantle of originalism. I'll believe it when I see it.
The great fear of the anti-federalists, who opposed the language of the constitution, was that no one man could conceivably represent adequately or honestly the interests of 30,000 citizens. They wanted the ratio to be smaller than that. Much smaller. Say on the order of one representative for every 15,000 of their fellows. That would imply today a US House of 20,000.
Instead what have we got?
Representation of one for 700,000 in a district, and climbing. Which is why you are so disgusted with your rich, arrogant and corrupt representative. He represents the guy who pays him the money he needs to advertise on radio and television so that you at least recognize his name and picture every two years and believe some stupid lie he tells about how he represents your interests even though he doesn't even know you exist. The last thing he wants is the real competition and anonymity of being just one of 20,000.
Imagine if your representative represented only 15,000 people. Chances are he would have to work pretty hard to get elected because no special interest is going to fork over millions just for his lousy vote.
He might even ring your doorbell.
What would it cost?
Even if you paid them all the same salary as we do today, half the anti-federalists' number, 10,100 representatives and senators, would cost us $1.76 billion. Their legislation might actually improve if we eliminated all their staff positions and made the elected do the actual work for a change. Throw in some campaign finance reform which stipulates contributions originate within the new districts, and repeal of the 17th Amendment, and you have a nice little package a decent presidential candidate could win on easily.
So far, however, none of them have enough imagination to see that 91 percent of the country is already ripe for the ideas.
If only they had some.
