When we think of the US Constitution, we instinctively think of what the founding generation called “the frame of government”. That is, we think of the three branches of the national government and their associated functions. The framers thought much more about the interactions between the national government and the state governments than we do today. That is a byproduct of the reduction of federalism in our system of government over time.
In The Road to Americanism, from analyzing the evolution of the State Constitutions, I propose a general model of an American Constitution that is composed of three main parts:
- Bill of Rights
- “Frame of Government”
- Amendment process
The founders actually did view the first two as major components of any written Constitution. The Anti-federalists famously objected to the absence of a Bill of rights; however, the amendment process is perhaps equally important as the Bill of Rights to protect liberty and freedom. The strength of a separate amendment process is that it puts alteration out of reach of regular legislation, preventing “legislative tyranny”. The US Constitution is properly labeled as a “limiting, written Constitution”. The Road contains a complete analysis of amendment processing and proposes improvements.
Of these three major components, the “frame” of government should actually be the least important. We should consider ourselves at liberty to change the government’s framework much more freely than either our rights or the process of altering it. In particular, there are two major problems that can be addressed by increasing federalism in our system:
- Power is too centralized in DC, creating a top-down system
- Currently each member of the House represents about 750,000 people
The First Congress actually submitted a proposed amendment that would fix the representation ratio at one for 50,000 (1/15 of the current). That would mean the House would grow from 435 to about 6,500. That is clearly an unmanageable number. In fact, 435 has led to an increase in party power because the party leaders basically dictate to the less senior members, creating a system that is top-down. The bottom line is that there can only be so many people involved in a discussion, and hundreds is way too many – even with computer assistance.
One way to address the representation ratio problem and the two major issues above is to alter the “frame” of government by creating another level of government below the national – a regional level. Computer systems use this kind of “fan out” (or tree structure) to optimize performance in a myriad of ways. It presents the opportunity to resurrect what Madison called “successive filtration”, or to create a better system that is less prone to corruption.
The scheme is pretty simple in principle. Instead of the people voting directly for their national representatives, they vote for their regional representatives. The regional representatives then select the national representatives, based upon the best interests of their constituents. How tightly bonded the national representatives are to the regional ones is an obvious point of great concern. The terms of each level could (and should) be rethought beyond the current two-year national terms. The First Congress’s proposal stopped at considering up to two hundred members of the House. It’s interesting to note that regions would tend to subdivide states since there are only 50 states. This creates a whole new topology of government.
The proposal above is a simple sketch that poses interesting problems for sure, but the potential rewards are to reduce the power in DC by a more federal (distributed) model and, at the same time, provide the people with better representation and more opportunity for two-way communication. The result could be a return to bottom-up governance.
