The problem is that in Congress, your House member represents about 800,000 people. Do you think he'll care what you think? And let's not forget about the Senate, who represents millions of people. I'm sure that Senator you vote for will totally listen to you.
It gets worse at the State level. Representation there is pretty piss poor in most states. California is especially egregious when you consider how gay marriage was rejected by referendum but was subsequently passed the following year by the state legislatures.
A true Democratic Republic requires both popular representation and regional representation. Popular representation is when the representation is based on population count while regional representation is based on a certain area.
So, in the spirit of wishful thinking, future planning, or party platform pushing, I'd like to push for the following structural changes to Congress and the state legislatures:
- Ensure that a House member represents no more than 30,000 voters. Notice I said voters, not citizens, and not people. The voters are the only people that a House member should represent.
- Repeal the 17th amendment and have the Senate selected by the state legislatures. This ensures that the Senate represents the region, not the people.
Unfortunately, in order for the Senate to properly represent the region rather than the people, changes need to be made to the state legislatures.
- Ensure that the lower house in each state legislature has one representative per 10,000 voters. Again, I said voters, not people nor citizens.
- The upper house needs to be broken down by county. In order to accomplish this, representatives are selected by either popular vote in that county or they are selected by local county and city leaders. No county should more representatives than another county so if one has two, then all others have to have two.
Following this model, the urban areas will dominate the lower chambers and the House, but the rural areas will have better representation in the upper chambers and the Senate. Hopefully this means that we'll see laws being passed which better represent the interests of everyone rather than stuffy urbanites who think that food magically appears in the grocery store.
For what it's worth, I know this is all wishful thinking. I doubt these ideas would receive widespread support from the political class or from any grassroots movement. The best chance would be to have the courts order the various states and Congress to redo their structure since this isn't something they'll ever consider passing.
Like I said, this is wishful thinking on my part, but maybe these ideas will catch on later. Hopefully, it won't happen after the government collapses.