The Peoples' House By Mr Ed

[Demeter]

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ed_robis_070528_the_peoples__house.htm


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May 28, 2007

The Peoples' House

By Mr Ed


The Peoples' House

As...new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the time.

Thomas Jefferson, 1816





....Throughout the six and a half years of the Bush Administration, which seems like a lifetime to many of us, countless numbers of articles have been written on the subject of this administration's contempt for the Constitution that has resulted in willful ignoring of its systems of checks and balances among the three branches of the federal government. Until the voters returned control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats in last year's midterm election, the Republican-controlled Congress, up to that time, virtually had functioned as a rubberstamp legislative body following the lead of its exalted leader, ignoring its responsibility, under the Constitution, of congressional oversight...Unarguably, the rank and file citizens of our country have not been well served by an executive branch that believes it has carte blanche to usurp what powers it wants to from the other branches of government...At the time Bush assumed the office of President in January 2001, the mission of the Republican Party was to gerrymander state congressional districts and manipulate state and federal election laws so as to monopolize political power in perpetuity. In effect-their purpose was to establish a one-party dictatorship.




The Peoples' House



Between the times the Constitution was drafted, until the requisite number of states had ratified it, for it to take effect, a lengthy period of debate and discussion took place. During this period, a number of shortcomings in the drafted document were identified...One of the most important was the size of the House. An undersized House, warned some of the state conventions, would not allow it to be the "guardian of the people. Others warned that a House dominated by an "aristocratic class" would make it vulnerable to corruption...During the early years our republic, despite congressional failure to produce an "Article the first", that would institutionalize the above concerns, the average population of a House district was roughly 30,000.

The consequences of the failure to amend the Constitution so that a numerical formula could be used to determine the House population plague us today, more so than ever before. While the number of House members has quadrupled since 1790, the population of the United States has increased 48-fold! House districts now range in population from 495,000 in Wyoming, to 902,000 in Montana.

Obviously, it would not be practical to increase the number of House members to return to the 30,000 number, but clearly, something needs to be done to at least to begin addressing this glaring imbalance.
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As long as the Supreme Court continues to rule, as unconstitutional, any law that does not recognize money as free speech, our elections will forever be subject to the debilitative influence of big money.






Authors Bio:
I am retired from the federal judiciary and live in a small community in rural Carroll County, Ohio with my dog Clem. My politics are leftist in nature, having evolved from classical conservatism in the early 1960's.