Last Rights

Guest post (David Speiser; Scott edited). A 'Last Rights' pun arguing for the 'right to Giant Congress.' Premise: Congress is historically hated and disconnected from constituents (gerrymandering, national polarization, big donors), but every proposed fix requires Congress to vote against its own interest, so it will never pass - therefore route around Congress entirely by getting 27 more states to ratify the dormant Congressional Apportionment Amendment (the last unratified amendment from the original Bill of Rights), expanding the House to ~6,641 seats (one per 50,000). Argues this ameliorates all three problems with data: many small districts are far harder to gerrymander (shown via state-legislature vs Congressional-delegation skew), each seat becomes too cheap to be worth buying, and the Electoral College small-state bias largely vanishes; maybe helps polarization and third parties too. Garnished with the 27th Amendment backstory (Gregory Watson's UT crusade and his C-to-A+ grade) and a genuine gem - the amendment's centuries-old self-contradicting 'typo' (a 'more than' where it means 'less than') that would force a clean textualism-vs-originalism showdown at SCOTUS.

Quality 73 · Strong. Strong band (upper). A fresh, clever, actionable angle (use a dormant amendment to expand the House without Congressional buy-in), backed by real data on gerrymandering and a delightful constitutional-typo hook. Held in Strong because it is one-sided advocacy that hand-waves the serious problems of a 6,641-member body, and is guest-authored (Scott edited). A=73.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. The core proposal is old (the authors note it 'comes up every few years'); the freshness is the route-around-Congress framing, the gerrymandering analysis, and the typo-as-textualism-test. B=50.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A fresh, actionable angle (route around a self-interested Congress by ratifying the dormant Apportionment Amendment to expand the House) backed by real gerrymandering data. Real topical relevance to governance reform, but one-sided guest advocacy that hand-waves the practical problems — low RWI.

Humor 1/5 · Lizardman’s Constant. Earnest policy-advocacy guest essay for ratifying the Congressional Apportionment Amendment ('Giant Congress'), with witty asides (the 'only A+ in UT history' tale, textualism-vs-originalism over a 200-year-old typo that 'would be hilarious', 'vanish in a puff of logic'); the title is a pun but humor is incidental → 1.