Cato V, Part X: Four Hundred and Thirty-Five Ways to Get What You Want, contd.

Oil companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, investment firms, banking firms, and social welfare organizations – to name but a few – respectively spend tens of millions of dollars every year in the United States for the purpose of gaining some measure of influence over that country’s elected officials. Sometimes they donate money directly to the relevant re-election campaigns, sometimes to the associated political actions committees, and sometimes to whichever tax-exempt organization whose objectives they believe align with their own. That there are four hundred and thirty-five Representatives and one hundred Senators – along with a much larger total number of state legislators – does not seem to deter this activity in the slightest. That is to say, the interests in question don’t seem to be much put off by the fact that they have to purchase the cooperation of a seemingly large number of people in order for their policy goals to gain significant traction. In part, this may be the result of much the same set of circumstances that made it so easy of the likes of Petrobras and Odebrecht to effectively take control of the contract approval process in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Given control of established oversight mechanisms and sufficient ideological cover, it may be the case that any legislature, no matter the size, can be brought under the control of a single exterior interest provided it deploys its resources with care.

That being said, it is likely nearer to the truth to suggest that the ability of an entity like the National Rifle Association to exert as much influence as it does over the national legislative process of the United States of America is due chiefly to its ability to raise and spend vast sums of money with relative ease. In 1788, it may be taken as a given, the idea that a single individual or organization could or would accrue and spend the sum total of the contemporary United States domestic debt on a single political race would surely have been thought of as downright ludicrous. Not only were non-governmental entities generally incapable of generating that kind of discretionary cash, but they would have surely balked at the thought of spending it all in one place. Such is no longer the case in 2019. Organizations like the NRA can and do spend thirty million dollars over the course of a single election cycle – over three times the total foreign debt owed by the United States in 1791 – because they know from experience that they’ll be able to make as much back and then some by the time the next campaign season rolls around. Faced with potentially hundreds of officeholders whose cooperation needs to be purchased, corporations, social welfare groups, and lobbying firms accordingly have little cause to abandon hope at the outwardly daunting prospect that looms before them. Instead, with the aid of the best expertise that money can buy, they spend, and spend, and spend, and spend. And while no single business, interest group, or private advocacy organization currently operating in the United States of America tends to allocate sufficient funds to secure the cooperation of an absolute majority at every level of government, the simple reason for this is that they really don’t have to go that far in order to get what it is that they want.

Now, in fairness to George Clinton, none of this is to say that the point which he was attempting to make in the cited text of Cato V was wholly and completely without merit. He was, as it turns out, incorrect in his evident affirmation that a sufficiently large legislature could successfully resist being influenced by entities or interests separate and outside of itself. As the intervening centuries have shown quite clearly, there are many more factors contributing to the likelihood of a given legislature coming under the sustained influence of an exterior entity or interest than merely the number of representatives seated therein. These factors include, but are not limited to, the existence of large corporations, the existence of political parties, the style and extent of political campaigning, the state of campaign finance laws, the existence of government-owned utilities, and the state of communications infrastructure and consumer media. The more money there is in the system, and the more opportunities there are for that money to be spent, the easier it becomes for individuals or organizations to exert their will within and upon the relevant institutions of political representation.

Granted, there may well be a number – a ratio of political representation to actual population – that might reliably serve to prevent a given legislature from coming under the sustained influence of a single exterior interest. Given a rate of one representative for every one hundred thousand people – a number which falls far below the current average of one member for every seven hundred and fifty thousand – perhaps the United States House of Representatives could conceivably lessen the influence of high-value campaign donors – namely major corporations and social welfare groups – though the consequent emergence of a number of smaller parties speaking to very specific regional or socio-cultural policy issues. Then again, it seems equally likely that the resulting three thousand-member legislative assembly would cease to function as intended for a whole other set of reasons having to do with its ungainly size. The fact that much larger countries than the United States of America – India, to recall but the most prominent – have elected to maintain relatively small national legislatures would seem to validate this course of reasoning. While a given legislature might have to be exceptionally large in order to counter the ability of wealthy individuals or private interests to purchase the cooperation of a sufficient number of delegates therein to claim functional control of the relevant agenda, it would also seem to be true that a given legislature become unacceptably dysfunctional as the number of constituents per individual representative decreases.

Clearly, George Clinton could not have known these things at the time he penned Cato V in 1788. His error, then, is properly attributed to ignorance rather than any fault on the part of his reasoning. Though he was, in the main, incorrect in his specific assessment of the relationship between the size of a legislature and the ability of its members to collectively resist the influence of exterior entities or interests, he was not wrong to call attention to the structure and composition of the version of Congress which he and his countrymen were being asked to consider. While the powers possessed by a given legislature might seem, to the casual observer, to be far more important than the number of seats allocated therein, the latter can in fact have a tremendous impact on which subjects ultimately rise to the level of debate and which constituent communities are most likely to be heard. Consider, by way of example, the United States of America as it exists in 2019. Most Americans living today probably know that there are four hundred and thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives. And most of them probably also understand – to some extent – that these seats are continually re-apportioned according to the results of a census that is conducted by the federal government every ten years. But there likely aren’t very many Americans in 2019 who give much thought as to how it is there came to be four hundred and thirty-five seats to begin with, or, if seats are indeed apportioned according to population, why that number hasn’t changed during their lifetime.

Information which might shed some light on these subjects is readily available, of course. People are free to read about the method of apportionment currently utilized by Congress, to peruse the data collected during the most recent census and compare it against state-by-state seat tallies, or to familiarize themselves with the text of the Reapportionment Act of 1929, by whose terms the current seat cap was set. Most of them won’t bother, however. The number of seats in the lower house of Congress is simply a fact which they feel free to take for granted on their way to worrying about much more urgent matters. Now, to be entirely fair to the current inhabitants of the American republic, there do seem to be any number of more urgent matters to attend to. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that matters of intense personal, economic, ideological, and constitutional significance can and do arise from among the day-to-day business of the United States Congress, the fact that the number of seats in the House of Representatives has been frozen at four hundred and thirty-five since before the Great Depression explains a great deal about which communities in the United States can and cannot claim access to the levers of institutional power. Decennial census data, rather than result in the addition of wholly new seats, instead initiates a process whereby seats are “shuffled” according more to disparities in representation than real population growth. In practice this means that while some states do currently enjoy relatively generous representation when compared to others – Wyoming’s single Representative, for instance, is elected by about five hundred and sixty thousand people; California’s fifty-three are each elected by approximately seven hundred and forty thousand – the average number of constituents per seat is only ever going to increase. Between 1793 and 1803, for example it stood at a mere thirty-four thousand. A century later it had risen to one hundred seventy-thousand. Today it sits at over seven hundred thousand. And as this number goes up, choices have been and will continue to be made about where seats are allocated and by what means they are drawn.

If New York, say, were to double its population between one census and the next, that state would not necessarily be entitled during the consequent re-apportionment process to twice as many seats in Congress. In accordance with the aforementioned Reapportionment Act, wholly new seats cannot simply be created in order to account for increases in population. The total must remain locked at four hundred and thirty-five. What must occur, then, is a shifting of seats away from other states until New York enjoys a representation in Congress that is roughly proportional to its newly-enlarged population. Maybe Ohio loses one or two seats, maybe Massachusetts three or four, and maybe Virginia as many as five. New York’s increase, then, is someone else’s loss; communities in other states that once possessed a clearer voice in Congress are now grouped together into larger constituencies where their interests will be forced to compete for attention or else be drowned out entirely. Not only that, but the redrawing of district boundaries even in newly-empowered New York – because, once again, the number of seats being added must fall somewhat short of the actual increase in population – are bound to result in larger constituencies and a general watering down of the representation in Congress enjoyed by the effected communities. Within this scenario, then, not only have people living in states outside of New York suffered for the population growth experienced by certain of their fellow Americans, but the people of New York have suffered as well. And as to which communities are most likely to have the negative effects or reapportionment foisted upon them, well, the most likely answer would seem also to be the most obvious: those whose interests are not valued, whose ability to reward prospective patrons is limited, or whose emerging power represent a threat to the status quo. 

Changing the method by which seats are apportioned in Congress might not stop these kinds of things from happening, of course. Nor would it necessarily do anything to affect the ability of Congress as a whole to stave off the influence of exterior interests – be they nefarious or otherwise – notwithstanding what George Clinton sought to affirm in the cited text of Cato V. But it would almost certainly have an outsized effect of some kind on the character and quality of representative government in the United States of America. The seats possessed by a given state in the House of Representatives are one of the principle means by which communities in that state make their desires, interests, and objectives known within the context of the federal government. Adding to a state’s delegation accordingly increases the ability of these communities to garner the attention of their assigned representative. Just so, taking seats away from a state’s delegation in Congress forces the communities therein to compete for the attention of their representative from within a larger overall body of constituents. If Congress were to change the method by which these selfsame seats are apportioned, they would therefore also be changing the dynamics that currently govern which voices are most likely to be heard within a given congressional district. Consequent to such an alteration, concerns which would otherwise have been drowned out are permitted to rise to the attention of this or that Representative. Data is collected, legislation is drafted, and laws are made, all pursuant to the interests of communities which would not have been able to exert themselves near so effectively if a different set of procedures governed the process of apportionment.

The results of a given presidential election are also closely tied to the rules by which states are granted seats in the House of Representatives. While each state, under the regulations currently governing the Electoral College, are guaranteed at least three votes for President and Vice-President – one for each of their two Senators and one for their minimum number of Representatives – the bulk of the vote tally allotted to each state tends to run much higher. California, for example, currently possesses fifty-five electoral votes; three of them are a function of this guaranteed baseline, fifty-two of them are owed to the seats allotted in the House of Representatives to the Golden State’s thirty-nine million residents. If California were to gain significant population over the course of the ten year period between one census and the next, their seat tally and their vote tally would naturally go up. Depending on how many residents California actually gained, however, the concomitant increases in Congress and the Electoral College may or may not be proportionate to how much California’s population really grew. If the population of the Golden State somehow doubled during the aforementioned ten year period, for example, the relevant congressional delegation and electoral vote would almost certainly not increase from fifty-three and fifty-five, respectively, to one hundred and six and one hundred and eight. Since there are only four hundred and thirty-five total seats to go around – pursuant to the aforementioned Reapportionment Act of 1929 – such a drastic swing in California’s favor would represent too large a loss for the other states to be accurately represented within the relevant institutions. California would ultimately gain, of course, and other states would lose, but not to the extent that California’s actual population growth would otherwise indicate.

The result of this confluence of emerging circumstances and established regulations would seem to be that the Golden State’s congressional delegation and its Electoral College vote would underrepresent its population relative to smaller states. Votes cast by California for President and Vice-President, while indeed reflecting the will of the majority of the voting residents thereof, would accordingly misrepresent the actual number of people – as a percentage of every vote cast – who chose this or that candidate. This is happening already, of course, albeit not as drastically as it might. California currently accounts for just short of twelve percent of the total population of the United States of America while controlling only ten percent of the five hundred and thirty-five votes in the Electoral College. Almost nine percent of the US population resides in Texas; its electoral votes account for only seven percent of the total. And Wyoming, at the other end of the spectrum, contains just short of two-tenths of a percent of the American republic’s three hundred and thirty million people while claiming almost sixth-tenths of a percent of every vote in the Electoral College. Changing the rules that govern the apportionment process would naturally alter all of these figures, as well as the advantages and disadvantages they confer on the effected states, and conceivably even the outcome of a given presidential election. Shift seats here, shift seats there; add to the total, take away from the total. Minute and technical though such matters may seem in the abstract, the effects which they can and do exert upon the character and quality of representative government in the United States of America are and can be exceptionally severe.

This, more than anything else, should be the message that the modern reader derives from the cited passage of George Clinton’s Cato V. Notwithstanding the literal meaning of what he was trying to say – an assertion whose validity has at this point hopefully been disproven – the relevant implication of his claim that the House of Representatives described by the proposed constitution contained too few members was that such structural details are as important to how the resulting government functions as any of the powers or responsibilities to which it might lay claim. What the lower house of Congress could and couldn’t do under the auspices of the proposed constitution was most definitely of tremendous significance as well, and a perfectly apt subject for scrutiny and critique. But so was the number of seats in that body which each state was set to possess, and the manner by which that number was arrived at, and the effects which that number was likely to exert upon Congress as a whole and each of the states in isolation. These might seem at times like somewhat arcane details; the products of obscure equations and complex calculations. And that they may be. But they also collectively determine who among the American people can speak and be heard and who must struggle to have their concerns and priorities addressed. Notwithstanding the fact that many of us presently don’t seem to pay much heed to this fact – and decline, therefore, to question the logic underpinning it – George Clinton rightly affirmed as long ago as 1788 that it was as important to interrogate such matters of apparent minutiae as to pay heed to what seemed to be the most important questions of state.