Five hundred thirty-seven elected federal officials are responsible for approximately 349 million Americans. That seems more than fair, doesn’t it? The Constitution guarantees every citizen an equal claim to representation, but it does not tell us how much representation that claim can realistically provide. It is a mathematical and philosophical question, not constitutional.Representation is often discussed in moral or legal terms. We speak of equal protection, equal voting rights, and equal access to the ballot. These are indispensable principles. However, representation also has a practical and restrained dimension. A representative cannot represent without listening, deliberating, responding, and deciding. Every one of those activities consumes a finite resource: time. Representation depends upon representative attention, and representative attention is finite.Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose every American were entitled to just one uninterrupted minute of direct attention from an elected federal government representative. With a population approaching 349 million, that would require 349 million minutes of representative attention — more than 5.8 million hours. If divided equally across the collective capacity of the nation’s 537 elected federal officials, each would face more than 10,800 hours of direct constituent contact, or roughly 451 consecutive 24-hour days without interruption. However, individual voters interact primarily with their own local representatives rather than all 537 officials at once. Yet this calculation illustrates a sizeable bottleneck: the federal government as an elected body possesses a strictly limited capacity for official focus.