Should the NC General Assembly be Enlarged?

[MozoVote]

N.C. has about 9,400,000 people - that is 78,000 or so per legislative district. Compared to New Hampshire's representation (about 1 member per 3500 people) it seems like we're well overdue for some resizing.

Glen could find himself fashionably out-of-step with the good ol boy network on Jones street to bring up this topic. He'd probably be the only legislator, willing to consider cutting his own power. Discussion of the allocation of political power will be in the air anyway next year because of census redistricting.

According to the N.C. constitution, it would take an act of the General Assembly and the Senate (60% in each chamber), followed by a vote of the people, to change the number of elected emembers. Difficult, yes - but we have amended the constitution a couple of times in the past few decades, such as for giving the governor veto power, and allowing for consecutive terms.

[rancher89]

I had assumed that with redistricting there would be some adjustment in the state house as well. I'll have to look into that.

[GunnyFreedom]

I like the idea, but I worry that the members will fight bitterly and the electorate won't understand it. The "giant house" concept to stem the growth of government has a lot of merit, but it would be insanely difficult to sell it to a legislature that was already 20,000 leagues away from the Constitution. It's worked quite well for a while in NH, but there may be some way to perfect it, as we can see it hasn't worked perfectly in NH either, and the flip side of the coin is it also makes reformers more difficult to make headway too.

On the positive side, if we (Ron Paulers) build up this enormous grassroots wave of Constitutionalism/Libertarianism etc, and then do this massive expansion, then we can quite probably take a majority of our people alone into State House.....

But that's a one-shot deal, and if you pull the trigger at the wrong time then you are pretty much stuck where you already are for a long, long time....

[MozoVote]

Well to be practical... freshman Legislators at best, just get to offer amendments to bills. Submitting fresh bills right away doesn't get far among the "pecking order" in place. Suggesting the state constitution be changed on your first term, would get very skeptical reactions from the old guard.

But I think you can see already, from the difficulty of mounting a campaign, why few citizens would consider making a run. (And at least your district is reasonably close to the capitol.)

I don't know where the best political climate would arise to reform the Leg. I see editorials at times that N.C. needs to "move up" to a full time Leg and do away with the "short sessions". That's been kicked around since the 1980s and never gets anywhere. But if there was a serious push for it, that could also be the time to suggest adding seats.

There could be some interesting cross-party agreement to do this, when the time arises. The state has been urbanizing, adding seats to the metropolitan counties. That makes campaigning more difficult in the poorer,coastal regions, with more dirt to cover.