Thank goodness the legislative session is over. Although the legislature passed some worthy laws this year, many of its 657 bills were stinkers, serving to further clutter our statute books.
So when I say we need a bigger legislature, some people understandably will be skeptical. Don’t we need less of everything legislative in this state?
But a larger legislature—specifically a larger state house—would be more democratic, more responsive to the people, and, I think, less likely to pass nonsense bills.
The point of a bicameral system is to have an elitist upper chamber and a populist lower one. But we have less than double the number of house members at 65 relative to the 35 senators. Colorado has a relatively small legislature among states, and each house member represents a relatively large number of constituents (see my ChatGPT inquiries). As a consequence, our house members tend to be aloof and more responsive to special interest groups than to the citizenry.
Article V, Section 45 of the Colorado Constitution states, “The general assembly shall consist of not more than thirty-five members of the senate and of not more than sixty-five members of the house of representatives, one to be elected from each senatorial and each representative district, respectively.”
But this has not always been the case. According to a history provided by the legislature, originally, in 1876, there were 26 senators and 49 representatives. We’ve had 65 house members since the 60s, a legal case suggests (I didn’t find a good complete history of the changes).
The census puts the population in 1880 at around 194,000. If we do the math, that means originally each house member represented around 4,000 people. In the mid-60s, the population of Colorado was around 2 million people. Today, the population is around 6 million people, which means each house member represents around 92,000 people.
A bigger statehouse
I propose we expand the size of the house to 200 members, which means each member would represent around 30,000 people, and then set the size to increase (or decrease) every ten years depending on population. We could bring the matter to a vote of the people initiated either by the legislature or by petition.
Yes, this would cost more money in terms of paying legislators and providing them space to meet. But, look, the goal is to have good government, not just to reduce the amount of money we spend on it. We wouldn’t want to cut the size of the legislature in half just to save money, and for the same reasons we shouldn’t resist expanding the size of the legislature on financial grounds. In this case, the expense would be worth the gains.
On net, a larger legislature would be less driven by special interests and strong personalities, more responsive to the voters, more diverse in terms of backgrounds and voices, and more driven by coalitions. On net, in a larger legislature, members likely would be more responsible stewards of government power and taxpayers’ dollars.
In smaller districts, candidates for state house would be able to run on a smaller budget. Of necessity campaigns would tend to be more about meeting face-to-face with constituents and less about high-cost advertising. With 200 house members, those representatives would be more likely to see themselves as having a temporary role in government rather than as career politicians. We might end up with a few more cranks, but we’d also end up with lot more regular people.
The premise of the American system is to have a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln said. Right now we have a state legislature that is not very responsive to the people. A larger state house would help put government back in the hands of the people it’s supposed to serve.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
