RumKetcher

Too many initials behind my name, which have never done as much for me as fatherhood, sailing, drinking rum, enjoying films, writing and playing music. USMC!

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

If you want to fix this fucked up mess, It's pretty easy. STEP ONE: First and most urgent reform is to enlarge the House. Today, one Representative serves more than 750,000 citizens. This is not representation; it is abstraction. The result is career politicians who know donors and lobbyists but not their people.
The solution is to reset the ratio to one Representative for every 50,000 citizens. With a population of 330 million, that would mean about 6,600 Representatives. Critics will say this is unworkable, too large to function. But technology has made administration simple. Voting can be streamlined, committees expanded, and deliberation organized. Other nations function with parliaments far larger than ours. The true obstacle is not logistics but our will to do it. What such an expansion would restore is intimacy. A Representative serving 50,000 citizens would know their communities. Citizens, in turn, would know their Representative. Campaigns would be small, inexpensive, personal. The celebrity model of politics would wither. National media would matter less; local trust would matter more. Representation would once again be a human bond, not a televised performance.
Our ratio of Representatives to people is one of the worst. The United Kingdom’s representation ratio is about 105,000 people per seat. German Bundestag members represent about 114,000 people per seat. The US House of Representative is about seven times larger, at about 760,000 per seat.
Resetting the ratio to 1 per 50,000 would expand the House to about 6,600 members - putting America in line with the original intent of the Constitution and much closer to the representation densities seen in other democracies.
Lobbyists and corporate interests would, or course, despise an expansion of the House because it would shatter their efficiency. Today, with only 435 Representatives, a few dozen lobbyists and trade groups can blanket Congress with money, favors, and access, shaping legislation at scale. If the House grew to thousands of members, each rooted in a small district and tied more closely to their neighbors than to Washington donors, the cost of influence would skyrocket and its effectiveness would collapse. Instead of courting a handful of powerful committee chairs, corporations would face thousands of independent voices, harder to buy and harder to corral. In short, it would dilute the currency of lobbying - making it far more expensive to purchase power and far more likely that genuine local interests would override corporate ones.
This increase would also significantly impact the practice of gerrymandering. Right now, with 435 House seats, each district is so large that lines can be drawn like surgical instruments, slicing cities, suburbs, and counties into carefully engineered shapes. A state legislature can tilt representation by shifting just a few boundaries, because each district holds hundreds of thousands of people. One cleverly drawn map can swing control of multiple seats.
But if the House were expanded to 6,000+ seats, each district would be small - more like a town, a cluster of neighborhoods, or a handful of counties. The smaller the unit, the less room there is for distortion. Gerrymandering depends on scale: the bigger the districts, the easier it is to hide manipulation inside sprawling boundaries. Shrink the districts, and the maps become granular, harder to rig without being obvious.
In fact, with 50,000-person districts, many would align almost naturally with existing communities: a city ward, a rural county, or a few suburbs together. That intimacy would anchor representation to real places rather than abstract lines. It would also dilute the stakes of any single district’s boundaries. Instead of a few hundred districts determining national power, thousands of smaller ones would spread influence widely - making it nearly impossible for one party to dominate simply through map-drawing.
Corporate interests and party machines would hate this as much as lobbyists do. Gerrymandering is a tool of control, a way to predetermine outcomes without persuasion. Smaller districts would make persuasion - real, local persuasion - necessary again.
Critics will say that expanding the House is too expensive. They will point to salaries, staff, and offices, and argue that thousands of new Representatives would drain the Treasury. But this is a narrow and shortsighted view.
The truth is that the cost would be negligible. Even if the House grew to more than 6,000 members, the entire budget of the chamber would consume less than two-tenths of one percent of federal spending. We spend more than that in a week on defense programs. We lose far more than that each year to tax fraud and loopholes. We throw away sums greater than that in bureaucratic waste. To argue that we cannot afford true representation is to confess that we value convenience more than liberty.
And in return for this small price, the nation would gain something priceless: representatives who are not beholden to million-dollar donors, but to neighbors; elections fought not on national television, but in town halls; politics rooted again in community rather than celebrity. Smaller districts would make campaigns inexpensive, perhaps so inexpensive that members need not be paid as much as they are today. Public service could once again be a duty, not a career path to wealth.
We must remember that the framers did not design a government for efficiency. They designed it for legitimacy. A large House, though unwieldy in appearance, would restore the intimacy of representation, and that intimacy is what makes laws legitimate. The cost is trivial. The gain is survival of the republic.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@JeffreyBrandes Love to hear your take on whether local governments are overstaffed and what the impact of underfunded pensions will have. That's where things get really messy. Cutting future revenue streams begins to look like County and City BK's

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@TheCinesthetic There are actually quite a few. Too many to name.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@JohnRou63401193 Florida shouldn’t even have constitutional amendments. Half the voters are below average intelligence. That’s just a statistical fact.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@TheCinesthetic

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@otokyo He's too smart.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@ChristinaPushaw Send them all to D. Leave the rest to the locals.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@frosthillphoto @mentze85196 Most Florida Men are Ohio transplants.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@ShooterMcGavin Typically, but not on a practice green.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@StraightFlorida We are going too fast and we have too many transplants.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@JeffreyBrandes You are correct Jeff. Alaska had a similar issue with rebates.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

This!

[Florida Native @OliviaFLNative]

Jay moved here and registered to vote in July 2019. By early 2021 Jay was planning to run for Congress. In the last five years Jay has run for FOUR different offices: US House FL 14; US House 15; FL Senate 14; FL Gov. 2026. His wife has registered for Hillsborough D-1 School Board. They don’t want to live the Florida life. They want to run it.

They are not servant leaders for Floridians, in my opinion, they are controllers. Say, “No!” to authoritarian controllers.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@Avabelly__ The Police.
Then reawakened by Radiohead.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@VintageRockN_85 Everyone always forget Steve Gaines. Had he or Duane Allman lived, there would be no arguments. Even so, bother deserve a place.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@RationalPurview ...and transplant. Keep the governor native.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@Austen Seattle is pretty bad. Segregation lives there. China is the most racist place in the world though.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@WhitakerTA_ Bullshit.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

Study history dude. Nevada, Oregon and other states, including CA had these laws on the books too. Loving changed that for all states. You pick 1967 (Loving case year), and think it was all about the blacks. But the Chinese had the same shit out west. And it's over. Get over it. Now we have Obama, Holly Berry, Lenny Kravitz, Zendaya, The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a slew of others crediting the progress.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@LEBcando @SecRubio Reach back, deep, and say that one thing you know that will let everyone know you are retarded.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@JoseRui27556516 @SecRubio You don't understand a thing. Especially the Cuban relationship with Florida, or the Spanish history of a large swath of states (mostly southern). Do you realize how many white people speak Spanish? How ingrained it is in our culture? Not going to hurt him.

[RumKetcher @rumketcher]

@GuajiroDigital @SecRubio But not Havana Club? The French own most of that. And it was sold to them for a pretty penny.