A bigger House

Proposals like this come along every few years.

The size of the House of Representatives hasn’t kept up with population growth for a very long time—in fact, it hasn’t even tried to—but one congressman has a solution.

Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon just introduced a bill that would increase the House to 585 members from its present 435 following the next census in 2030, reducing the number of constituents each representative would have and, hopefully, making government more responsive and more reflective. While the proposed change wouldn’t take effect for another 10 years, we’ve envisioned how it would have affected congressional reapportionment following the 2020 census in the map at the top of this story (click here to enlarge).

Up until the 1910s, the House had increased in size nearly every decade as the population grew, but with only a two-year exception—when Alaska and Hawaii first became states—it’s been stuck at 435 members since 1913. At the time, America’s population was just one-quarter of what it currently is, yet the number of seats in the House has been frozen in place by law since 1929. Consequently, the number of constituents in the average House district has grown from 210,000 after the 1910 census to 761,000 today, and that number could pass 1 million in the coming decades if the law does not change.

[…]

The House’s large ratio of constituents to representatives is also a major outlier among advanced democracies, and scholars have long noted that the size of the lower chamber in most country’s parliaments tends to correspond to the cube root of their population. If the U.S. adhered to that formula, the House would now have about 690 seats, making it more than one-half larger than it is today.

Blumenauer’s bill doesn’t expand the House quite that much; rather, he explains his 585 figure by noting that 149 total seats have shifted between states during reapportionment since the current cap of 435 was reached and adds one more to keep an odd number of members. Nonetheless, his proposed one-third increase could still go a long way toward making the chamber itself more representative of America’s diverse population.

It’s been a few years, but I’ve seen proposals like this before. They’re philosophically sensible but there are practical obstacles, such as creating the office space for all those extra people, and that’s before you get to the resistance any number of folks would have to a very literal expansion of government. I noted this mostly to point out that here in Texas, the problem is even more exacerbated at the state level, mostly in the Senate. Twenty years ago, there were 31 State Senators and 32 members of Congress, which meant that they each represented about the same number of people. But as Texas has gotten six more members of Congress after the last two Census counts, the gap between the size of a Senate district and a Congressional district is growing. Given the continued growth of Texas, it makes just as much sense to expand the size of the Legislature – yes, both chambers, for the same reasons as cited above. And also for the same reasons, it ain’t gonna happen. Look for me to write another post like this in another decade or so, and we can acknowledge the same outcome for the same reasons once again. Daily Kos has more.

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