There is a growing swell of discontent among the American people.

From Tea Party Patriots to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a sentiment that elected officials in Washington, D.C. don’t represent the people is spreading.

It has ballooned in recent years, as evidenced by the lack of confidence the people have in their elected officials — Congressional approval ratings have stayed below 20 percent for more than five years.

Many people have come to realize that interest groups control almost every policy decision and politician.

Many are wondering how it ever got this bad, and where the disconnect happened between those elected, and the people they are supposed to represent.

Disapproval ratings are at all-time highs, with 80 percent of the people dissatisfied with the job Congress is doing. Even President Barack Obama’s approval rating has been 10 to 15 points lower than the average for a president in the last 50 years.

How did our political system and trust in those running it get to be so bad?

Than answer is simple — lack of representation. The Reapportionment Act, passed June 18, 1929, fixed the number of Representatives to 435 seats.

Article I, Section 2, of the Constitutions states: “The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state will have at least one Representative […]”. The Reapportionment Act violates that mandate.

It is not hard to imagine how most of the 435 representatives have been corrupted by moneyed interests. If we were to follow the Constitution once again, however, people would have more representation in D.C.

Ohio’s population is 11.54 million people. If we had the constitutionally prescribed number of Congressmen, Ohio alone would have 384 representatives.

Nationally, there would be more than 10,000 representatives.
Instead, the population of the United States increases annually, but the number of representatives stays stagnate. Every year the representatives become disconnected more and more from the people because they spend too much time away from their constituents.

As they have more and more people to serve, elected officials have to become less principled, and more moderate to garner enough popular support to stay in office.

Every representative now has around 700,000 people to please, rather than the 30,000 prescribed by the Constitution.

Instead, the private interest groups now have much more power over representatives, because they finance the expensive campaigns needed to gain election from more than 700,000 voters on average.
It would be much more difficult for interest groups to have power over Congressmen if there were more than 10,000 of them.

Senators are also directly elected by the people, though I vehemently disagree with that particular amendment. The people have less representation, and, thus, less power over their representatives. Their role in the Constitution was to protect the interests of the state, not the people.

Direct election of Congressmen should bother you, because each state has two senators. Both houses of Congress now represent the people, and the states have no representation. If you often wonder how the federal government can continuously encroach on states’ rights, look no further than the fact that states have no Congressional representation to fight for their interests.

It is time we returned to the Constitution, and there is no reason why the people should keep accepting this lack of representation.
The people don’t have the constitutionally prescribed representation, the states don’t have the constitutionally prescribed representation, and still people wonder how it has gotten so bad in Washington, D.C.

A Federal system of government, which we are supposed to have, cannot work if the people and the states don’t have the representation they were designed to have. Instead, what we see is a central government incrementally encompassing more and more power over the states, and the people.

If “taxation without representation is tyranny”, every single law passed by Congress since 1929 has been a tyrannical overreach. With a lack of representation, it is no wonder this country is sliding closer toward totalitarianism.