I believe Washington DC was close to the median center at the founding of the US. I've often wondered about the effect on US government if the seat of the executive (white house), legislative (capitol), and judicial (supreme court) branches had to move to the median center after every census. We need something to reduce the influence of K street. Something to keep the lobbyists from getting too cozy would be nice.
> Something to keep the lobbyists from getting too cozy would be nice.
That doesn't make much sense to me. The firms that rent office space on K Street don't have power because of the location of their office... it's the other way around: K Street real estate is rented out by those firms because of the street's proximity to power.
Move the power center and the firms currently renting office space on K Street, DC, USA will instead rent out space on Blah Street, Middlepoint, USA.
More-over, I don't know if moving the capitol of the country to the median point as defined in this article makes any sense either. It's one of those "literally everyone loses" propositions because "median" isn't "modal". If anything, it could make sense for the capital to be located at the midpoint by travel time.
But it's all wildly impractical if you stop and think about. The amount of infrastructure alone would require decades of work. And states would have to surrender sovereignty over a big chunk of their (settled!) land. Etc.
The midpoint by travel point mattered more in an era where travel across the country was measured in weeks or months.
At this point the only people with difficult transport are those in rural communities that may lack air services, though to combat this somewhat Congress funds the Essential Air Service at hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Good point. Again, the whole thing feels a bit silly. Not a huge fan of DC but not sure why you'd think moving the capitol would actually change anything about how politics works...
I think this "move the capitol" thing is pushed by people who think "then DC would be accountable to small town America because it would be in small town America!"
Which, LOL, no. That's not how it'd work at all. That small town would lose self rule, be developed into a mid-sized city, become completely divorced from its previous character, and nothing else would change other than building a big ass city in Small Town, IL for no particularly discernible reason.
Which sets aside the fact that Small Town America already has an absurdly disproportionate amount of representation per human inhabitant.
There's an easy solution. Constitutional amendments written before the 1960s (more or less) had no expiration dates... they can be ratified centuries later. And have been.
It just so happens that there is an outstanding constitutional amendment, which was ratified by 11 or 12 states... it's already partially there. And if someone were to finish ratifying it, it would add almost 6000 extra representatives to the House (after the next census).
For one, this means that they'd need to figure out something other than the Capitol building, which can't seat that many. The probable result is multiple buildings, which can be outside of DC, and teleconferencing.
For two, this is far too great of a number for the lobbyists to be able to effectively bribe. Even now, they struggle (and sometimes lose) when attempting to push legislation their way. Raising the number of legislators they have to canoodle by x16 will strain both budgets and expertise.
For three, it probably also breaks the stranglehold the two parties have on Congress for at least the next 20 or 30 years. Their party mechanisms aren't large or sophisticated enough for this. They already have trouble sometimes fielding candidates in every race.
And Congress can't cockblock this. It's completely out of their hands. If someone were to convince their state legislature to ratify this, it would be newsworthy and catch the attention of other states many of which would follow suit. If a Wyoming or an Iowa or New Mexico were to give it any attention at all, I think it would inevitably become ratified.
