Sunday, October 11, 2020

Idaho Constitutional Amendment on November Ballot

 HJR4 will fix the number of state senators at 35 (its current number).  Currently, our state constitution allows the number to be as low as 30 or as high as 35.  I would prefer the larger number be fixed.  The fewer people each legislator represents, the more likely he is the listen to his constituents.  When I lived in California, there were hundreds of thousands of people in each Assembly district.  The chance of ever meeting your Assembly member, much less communicating your concerns, was limited.  The New Hampshire House of Delegates has 400 members, each representing about 3,300 people.  I would guess that most people in the Granite State likely not only know their legislator by face, but whether or not to count the silverware at the end of having him over for dinner!

I know that it would be impractical to have each member of the U.S. House represent such a small number of people (imagine the size of the chamber, the Star Wars Galactic Senate chamber), but to the extent we can bring legislators closer to the people they represent, the better.

2 comments:

  1. My preference would be one per county, but that isn’t going to happen.

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  2. Reynolds v. Sims (1964) abolished one state senator per county, but not two U.S. Senators per state.

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