Although the focus of most recent political news had been Kevin McCarthy’s increasingly desperate attempts to grovel his way to becoming America’s first invertebrate speaker of the House of Representatives, buried in the hoopla are genuine decisions to be made about how the nation’s democracy should function.
In 1787, when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were debating how the lower house of Congress would be structured — some still referred to it as the House of Commons — they were almost all in agreement that although members would be elected by the “people,” they actually meant very few of the people. (Only 6% of Americans were eligible to vote in the first national election in 1788.) In addition, they believed that to function effectively, Congress needed to exclude members of lower classes, and so favored large electoral districts to limit the number of representatives and make it difficult for all but the wealthy to travel within their confines and effectively campaign.
Although class prejudice was certainly a part of their rationale, the delegates were also conscious of the difficulty in enabling effective rule in a legislative body. The more voices to be heard, they understood, the more diversity of viewpoints to be managed, the more discipline and controls would be needed in order to get anything done. Their task was to try to find the proper balance between participatory democracy and workable governance.
