Quadruple Staff Budgets for Better Representation

Jonathan Bernstein: “In a nation soon to reach 350 million people, there’s no realistic way for the national legislature to have districts that allow most people to know their representatives.”

“So instead of, say, quadrupling the size of the House, how about quadrupling (or more!) each member’s budget?”

“Yes, a lot of that money would be wasted or spent on frivolous things, but so what? Constituents might not have any better chance of knowing their representative personally, but they would have a better chance of visiting a district office, knowing a district staffer (or even a Washington-based one), and perhaps ‘knowing’ their representative on social media.”