Rebuild the House (3100 Representatives Instead Of 435)

"Big House"

(The Carson Mansion)

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Published: January 8, 2013

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Luke Pearson

To the Editor:

The founding fathers intended that voters should have personal knowledge of the people they sent to govern in Washington. Few of today’s voters really know the candidates; this makes misrepresentation easy and effective, and creates the need for large sums of money for political campaigns, leaving the candidates beholden to those moneyed interests. So, what happened?

House districts were supposed to be small. The final act of the Constitutional Convention was to reduce the minimum size of a House district from 40,000 to 30,000. Today the average Congressional district includes 710,000 people, so only a small percentage of the voters have any idea what the candidates are like as people.

The founders believed that for a republican form of government to succeed, it should be populated with men of virtue. They also recognized that government quite naturally attracts the power-hungry. So they sought to build safeguards against scoundrels into the system. Over the years we’ve allowed these safety mechanisms to be overridden.

The safeguard most easily restored is a return to small House districts. It can be achieved without a constitutional amendment by the simple passage of a bill to reduce the size of Congressional districts to, say, 100,000 people. House membership would increase from 435 — set by a 1911 law — to about 3,100.

This move has the added benefit of introducing a flow of new faces into Washington. These men and women would owe their seats more to the reputation they enjoyed within their community and less to the half-truths and misinformation put out by slick mass media campaigns paid for by the big-money interests. Surely among them would be the men and women of virtue so necessary to the proper functioning of our republican form of government. And so lacking today.

GAIL L. JOHNSON
Ewing, N.J., Jan. 7, 2013

The writer is the author of “Two Years to Democracy: The 2Y2D Plan.”

Editors’ Note: We invite readers to respond by Thursday for the Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Ms. Johnson’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail:letters@nytimes.com