This would also open the door to proportional representation in both houses.
The problem we are seeing today with the two-party system is the ossification of the "party elites," rather than the proper representation of the party membership as a whole. As I pointed out in my July 10, 2010 OpEdNews article " D-I-V-O-R-C-E; Dems vs Organized Labor ," the Democratic Party has been taking Big Labor for granted since the late 1970's. It cost them with the so-called Reagan Democrats, while the pro-business policies of Bill Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council amounted to a trial separation between Big Labor and the Democratic Party.
The Democrats learned their lesson in 2010 (I hope), and can look at Wisconsin and Ohio as examples of what organized labor can mean for a candidate. There are however, too many "blue dog" conservative democrats (the spiritual descendants of 1947's anti-labor Dixiecrats and Western Democrats who depended on farmers to get elected, and who then helped Robert Taft and Fred A. Hartley's GOP cohorts overturn President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act), who vote with Republicans more often than they vote with their Democratic brethren.
I believe that the cause of this is the state party systems which ensure that a certain power structure is kept intact. These state structures are purposely designed to: 1) prevent party evolution at anything other than a snail's pace, 2) prevent the creation of any competing third parties.
It is both the Republican and Democratic Party hierarchies, at both the state and national levels, which represent the greatest impediments to meaningful political reform in this country. They have no wish to see the expansion of the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate beyond their current size. An expansion means less control over candidates for those offices for those two parties, as would any meaningful campaign finance reform. Nor do they wish to see the establishment of viable, competing "third" parties, or proportional representation; this would reduce their ability to control and dominate elections. They do not wish to see an end to the electoral college; this would force a widespread reorganization of election strategy from controlling particular states, to demonstrating to the nation as a whole who is the best choice. It would also mandate a "run-off" election if no candidate received a majority; the time of the "plurality President" I believe has passed.
I can see that certain ideologues, who cannot think "outside of the box," will automatically object to the expansion of the House and Senate on some ill-conceived and poorly thought out principle that smaller government is always better. Anyone can look at how the public schools in our country are declining on "half-rations" over the last thirty-five years: with larger classes, fewer textbook choices and teachers, and reduced choices for the students in terms of their curriculum, can see that this not necessarily the case. For example, the public school systems in the State of California have gone from the top five to the bottom ten in the nation since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
The greatest danger to our liberty by the government is not in an expanded Congress, or a a larger set of domestic services in education, health, housing, and human services. It is, as President Eisenhower warned us fifty years ago, the danger presented by the paranoid functioning of the intelligence, procurement, ground, naval, air and paramilitary forces of the military-industrial complex.
We have not had anything close to effective control of the Military-Industrial Complex since the National Security Act of 1947. We have a Pentagon report that 2.3 trillion dollars of the taxpayers' money could not be accounted for in 2001 by the Department of Defense. The best known piece of our Intelligence community, the Central Intelligence Agency, has been described as a "rogue elephant" by Senator Frank Church in the late 1970's, and as needing to be "broken into a thousand pieces," according to President John F. Kennedy. The Department of Homeland Security represents the greatest expansion and aggregation of Federal Government power since the National Security Act of 1947, as well as the greatest threat to American civil liberties since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798.
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