We at least had a limited oligarchic republic on a federal level…the balance between state and federal kept it reasonably in check for a while. We have more of a mob rule democracy today than an oligarchic republic…oligarchs like their cities to be nice, our cities are trash and lack law & order. But I agree with you on which is preferable.

Now this is more nuanced, our Republic was defined as representative in a specific sense. We no longer meet that type of representation. Reducing the number of decision makers to no longer be representative would make us more of an oligarchy. In general a republic by definition must be representative of the voting population. If you reduce the number to not be representative, it ceases to be a republic, at least not for the group being no longer being represented. But given the way our politics have been carried out the past couple decades, our representatives treat it like a mob rule democracy. They get elected and feel the desire to impose everything instead of representing their community as a whole. Large swaths of the population fail to get a representative who votes their views.

That’s wrong, the house was meant to be representative of actual communities and that implies no more constituents than someone being likely to know someone who knows the rep. By capping the house, you guaranteed a republic that behaves more like a democracy and made it where you have to export your knowledge of the representative to a party of broad positions. Every issue becomes a 50/50 party line topic. The solution to the growing population would have been delegate elections for communities where those delegates then come together to vote/select the eventual representative. No different than how senators were supposed to be selected by state legislatures. Just on a smaller more localized scale. It is also a massive failure that we didn’t force states to have electoral colleges as well. They are now the size of legitimate nations across Europe and behave as simple city states that oppress all the communities that were tied to the one big city with no legal protections.

The issue that goes under discussed is that our Republic was disastrously altered fundamentally between the civil war and WW2. Everything since then is a symptom. 1. The 14th amendment gets attention for the birth right citizenship issue, but the fact that it was used to impose the bill of rights onto state governments completely changed the original intent of our bill of rights. The freedom of religion worked on the federal level because state governments had Christian denominations written into their own foundations. Legally banning certain groups from influence up until the 14th eliminated their Christian nation status. The 1st amendment was intended to protect the states having their specific denominations without the feds imposing a national church. Once this was removed, it changed all sorts standards that were later exploited by civil rights laws to remove Christianity from government altogether. 2. The federal reserve for all the reasons we hate. 3. The 17th amendment to remove state governments from having a voice in the selection of Supreme Court judges and all laws. That was how the 14th could be exploited further and the ability of states to keep their sovereignty was eliminated. 4. The capping of the house is another issue with unresolved consequences. Centralizing too much power and creating a system where modern house reps have more constituents than possible to represent. When democrats say we are a democracy, they aren’t wrong because of those specific changes. The only thing keeping us a republic is the electoral college system.