For starters, there is an ever wider gulf between Americans and their representatives, as the average number of people represented in a district has more than tripled, from about , in to about , in Increasing the size of the House would not resolve all the challenges facing the U. For instance, adding representatives could decrease day-to-day legislative efficiency, and it would undoubtedly increase the size of the federal government. Yet expanding the House is one of the more straightforward reforms that leaders in Washington could pursue in our era of polarized politics.
The size of the House is determined by statute , not the Constitution, meaning Congress could pass and the president could sign a law to change it. The House arrived at that number because of political expediency — and it has stayed there because of it, too. Up until , when the chamber expanded from to seats, 4 the size of the House had experienced a mostly unchecked pattern of growth. Only once, after the census, did the number of seats in the House not increase; , however, marked the last time the House grew, even though the U.
The census is when things broke down. Nevertheless, the Republican chair of the House Census Committee put forward legislation in to increase the size of the House by 48 seats — in total.
Once again, this would have prevented any state from losing a seat, a politically attractive option. Congress tried a number of alternatives. First, the House passed an amended bill to keep the House at members. Eleven states stood to lose seats as a result, and unsurprisingly many senators from those states worked behind the scenes to keep that bill from ever getting a vote in the Senate.
Next, the House tried to expand to just seats instead of , which would have caused only two states to lose a seat, but that narrowly failed by four votes on the House floor.
This left Congress at an impasse, and over the next few years, reapportionment stalled. Others argued that non-citizens ought to be excluded from the counts, which would have primarily affected Northern states with large immigrant populations.
There were also arguments over which method was best for apportioning seats, as one method tended to put slightly more seats in less populous states and the other put more seats in more populous states. The lack of consensus on how to reapportion the House meant that by the late s, reapportionment had dragged on for nearly a decade and had all the makings of a constitutional crisis.
Fortunately for electoral legitimacy, Republican Herbert Hoover won both the popular and electoral vote in the presidential election. In April , Hoover called a special session of Congress, where one of the main focuses was apportionment, and by June, legislation had passed both the House and Senate and was signed by Hoover.
It capped the number of House seats at and moved the responsibility of determining the seat count from Congress to the president — an early example of Congress giving away power to the executive branch.
Specifically, it cut requirements that members be elected in single districts and that those districts be contiguous and compact, serving relatively equal-sized populations. This meant a state that lost seats could now draw wildly disproportionate districts to keep power in more rural parts of the state.
Montana and Rhode Island, for instance, will each have about , fewer people per district than the national average. Delaware, by contrast, will be the most underrepresented state in the union: Its , residents will have just one representative.
Bigger states also suffer from underrepresentation compared with some smaller states. Take California: Its population is But we could get much closer to equal representation if we expanded the size of the House beyond our current and rather arbitrary cap of That change in law would eliminate a year monument to bigotry, make the House more democratic, and make the Electoral College more representative of the population of our country.
Smaller districts, accompanied by redistricting and electoral reform, will also create more competitive districts, which will mean less virulently partisan candidates—and, hopefully, legislators. Republican candidates running in cities and the suburbs will find it hard to be xenophobic or to oppose reproductive rights and action on climate change.
This may not end political polarization, but it is a vital first step in reforming the House. On the first matter, James Madison had strenuously argued for proportional representation in both bodies. He believed this was essential for a strong national government.
The mid-Atlantic small states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey—were obdurate: equal representation in the Senate or nothing. The second issue was how to count enslaved persons. In , the Congress, desperate for revenue, sought to impose a per-state levy based on population, which raised the issue of whether and how to count the enslaved. The Southern states argued against the counting of any slaves because it would keep their revenue contribution lower; the Northern members wanted to count all slaves.
Madison proposed a three-fifths compromise for revenue purposes—three out of every five of the enslaved population would be counted. Four years later, during the Constitutional Convention, the issue of how to count enslaved persons arose again. This time the issue was not revenue but representation, and the positions of the North and South were reversed. By , enslaved persons made up about 40 percent of the populations of Maryland and the Southern states. Still others argued for another three-fifths rule—three of every five enslaved persons would be counted.
Finally, they had to decide on the number of people that constituted a congressional district—and thus the size of the House of Representatives. The second matter was settled first, when, in June , the three-fifths rule was agreed to. These amendments were the most important issues in his campaign for Congress against James Monroe, his opponent then and, 28 years later, his successor to the presidency.
He defeated Monroe 1, to Yes, the districts where much smaller then. Lesson learned, Congressman Madison went to New York as member of the First Congress and authored a series of amendments now known as the Bill of Rights. His proposed First Amendment was a guarantee that the House would begin with a defined number of members—which was not included in the Constitution—and would grow according to a specific formula laid out in the amendment.
It fell short of ratification by one state. Had it been ratified, the freedoms we now enjoy as part of the First Amendment, including speech and the press, would have been the Second Amendment.
For the next years, from , membership in the House of Representatives grew as the population increased and as new states were admitted to the Union—with the exception of , when the Congress reduced the size of the House membership. The Reapportionment Act of increased House membership from to and allowed a new member each from the Arizona and the New Mexico territories when they joined the Union.
In , Fenway Park opened, the Titanic sank, and the House had members. Fenway Park has changed, ocean liners are ancient history—but the House still has the same number of representatives today as it did then, even as the population has more than tripled—from 92 million to million.
After the Census determined that more Americans lived in cities than in the rural areas, a nativist Congress with a racist Southern core faced its decennial responsibility of reapportioning a country that had experienced a large growth in immigrants. The population had grown in ten years by 15 percent, to million. Recent immigrants lived in vibrant enclaves with their fellow countrymen. They spoke their mother tongues, shopped at ethnic stores and markets, partied at ethnic clubs, and attended ethnic plays and movies.
Earlier anti-inclusion acts had already restricted immigration from Asia. The population of the country has more than tripled in the intervening century, making it impossible for each member of Congress to represent even roughly the same number of people. That is why it is high time that the size of the House increase dramatically, which can be achieved with mere legislation , not a Constitutional amendment.
Specifically, by my calculations, there ought to be seats. The seats are reapportioned every 10 years after the decennial Census. As of , every member of the House ought to represent approximately , people. But given the wide disparity in state populations, from Wyoming to California, there is no mathematical way to get anywhere close to this parity without somehow inventing fractional lawmakers.
Adding many more seats would dramatically decrease this disparity. But before we get to that, we need to consider the thousand-pound salamander in the room. I strongly suspect that roughly doubling the number of representatives in a state would of a glorious nightmare for the Gerrymandering crowd.
The dark art of district-hacking includes many tricks, but it often boils down to dividing urban regions like a pizza to minimize their voting power. There would simply need to be too many districts in too small a geographic area to divide and conquer nearly as effectively. Or, in the alternative case where one tries to pack as many unfriendly voters into as few districts as possible, more districts means a larger proportion of gimmes to the opposing party.
Which is not to say that the evil genius of Gerrymandering would be defeated outright, but a larger number of districts would also make the practice considerably more obvious when courts get involved.
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