Rep. Sean Casten

So many – this was probably three or four years ago.

We were on a bipartisan, bicameral trip to Iceland.

Iceland has had – they have the longest continuously active parliamentary form of government.

They first met in like the year 900.

There's all this fascinating history.

And so we're meeting with them, and they're showing us their chambers, and they described how –

Sometime in the last century, they essentially adopted the U.S.

form of government.

And they went through and he said, after 20 years, we got rid of what you would call the Senate because it just gummed things up.

And they're sitting there and Tom Carper gets this big frown on his face and all of us House members start cheering.

There's sort of an acknowledgment that that structure – and I say this on the judges because the Senate always is going to skew conservative – and again, in the lowercase c sense because it always overly represents –

rural areas, people closer to the land, or sort of traditional, all that sort of stuff.

And maybe that made sense in 1789, but it means that the swing vote in the Senate is always very far to the right of the median American voter.

Only it does, because it says that you can't amend the Constitution in any way that would change the proportional representation in the Senate.

Well, number one, it's worth reminding people that for all the people who work in Washington, only 537 of them won an election.

If you're concerned about size of government, the elected folks are not the problem.

So we've got legislation to do that.

The way we did ours is say we will –

um on every going forward census you expand the members of the you expand the number of members in the house rather than expanding the number of people we represent and you lock a district at 500 000

We picked 500,000 for sort of arbitrary reasons, but there's been a number of political scientists who look at this cube root law that if you look at all the parliamentary democracies of the world, you put population on one axis, how many members.