Should 535 People be in Charge of Running the Country? Maybe it’s time to update our political system Kenneth L. Warner Rome Magazine

Maybe it’s time to update our political system by Kenneth L. Warner Rome Magazine

Time will have to stand still before we ever update our political system to meet the needs of 50 states and 332 million people. (Photo by Charlotte May on Pexels)

Starting a year after the Declaration of Independence, America was made up of 13 loosely joined former British Colonies and was governed by something called the Articles of Confederation.

It was kind of a disaster.

And so, guys like James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton were busy writing The Federalist Papers in support of an actual Constitution for the new country. So influential were their ideas, that they caused a bunch of rich white men to gather in Philadelphia to perform what was later coined a “miracle”.

They wrote the United States Constitution.

Writing that document came as the result of a lot of compromise but, it has stood for a couple of centuries as a miracle in government. Countries all over the world have used it as a basis for writing their own constitutions.

Our daily lives are governed by the thoughts of these founding fathers. But in today’s modern age, I’ve come to believe that the only founding father worth paying attention to is Benjamin Franklin. He deserves the title more than anyone simply because he had 17 illegitimate children.

Makes you wonder what his weekly child support bill was, but no matter.

The fact is, the U.S. Constitution is really pretty amazing. But even the founders realized that times would change. Tom Jefferson who crafted the Declaration of Independence, (who missed the constitutional convention because he was on a diplomatic mission to France), was known to have said that having a revolution every ten years or so was a good idea as the world changes very quickly.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean doing it like the January 6th fiasco, but he was right in thinking that times would change.

Constitution writers eventually came to the same conclusion and thus we have 27 amendments, starting with the first 10, the Bill of Rights that guaranteed basic rights like freedom of speech, religion, and other such radical ideas. The rest of the amendments that were passed throughout our history included such unique ideas as the freeing of slaves, voting rights for women, and more.

All good ideas.

Now though, we should probably ask ourselves if some of the basic rules of the Constitution should be modified with the change of times.

Take age requirements for starters. The minimum age for running for President is 35. Senators have to be 30. And, members of the House, 25. They claimed the age requirements for running for President had to do with the lack of maturity of men under 35. Apparently, they overlooked the fact that Thomas Jefferson was only 33 when he crafted the Declaration of Independence and wasn’t found lacking.

As I wrote recently, those who wrote the Constitution really put the minimum age requirements in because they didn’t want young upstarts running against them, and wanted to protect their asses as they grew into old age.

They were so successful that now Congress is full of old people who pass laws they will never see the consequences of.

Maybe instead of minimum age requirements, we should add maximum age requirements as well.

Age requirements aren’t the only issue that needs reconsideration in this modern time.

Representation is another requirement that has unintended consequences. When the Constitution was written, they needed the little states to sign on with the big states. To facilitate this, it was agreed that every state, no matter the population, should have 2 Senators.

It’s a little out of proportion.

Today that means that the people of Wyoming for example, have some of the most powerful leaders in the free world. These guys can win election to the world’s most powerful legislature by campaigning to fewer people statewide than live in the county I grew up in.

Requirements for numbers in the House of Representatives are another set of problems.

Each of the 435 members represents 761,179 people.

It used to be that the number of members was determined after the U.S. Census every ten years. This “reapportionment” obviously caused for political fighting on a grand scale as parties and states in the expanding country battled for more representation.

In 1920, a member of Congress represented 241,000, fully a third of the people they do now.

No wonder my representative doesn’t recognize me.

So prior to the 1930 census, Congress passed the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act to avoid the battles.

Article I, Section II sets the guidelines that every state shall have at least one while the actual number in any state depends upon population. It also says that the number cannot be greater than one for every 30,000 people.

The long and short of it is that representation is now way out of whack and needs to be reconsidered. Having 535 people write laws for the other 300 million makes no sense. My high school student council had a better balance of representation.

The political circumstance facilitating this change is about as likely as my winning the Powerball lottery. On the other hand, all it takes is a dollar and a dream.

But if we are to survive as a country, it is inevitable.