The Size of the House

With all the usual hype about the presidential election, it’s easy to forget about one of the most under-reported dilemmas in American politics: the size of the House of Representatives.

It’s a simple matter of population. The original House consisted of 106 members, who together represented a national population of about 3.5 million. That’s a ratio of 1:33,000. Today, we have 435 Representatives in the House, and a national population of 300 million. The ratio now is 1:690,000.

So originally, each member of the House represented about 33,000 people, whereas today each Rep covers 690,000.

The problem here is that the House of Representatives was supposed to be local representation at the national level. Local notables would be elected to represent their communities – people with similar lifestyles and demographics. Nowadays, each representative has to represent such a diversity of people and places that local representation is lost. House members simply end up representing the interests of the most electorally important demographics and all but ignoring the rest.

What can we do about it? Maybe not much. The size of the House is set by law, not by the Constitution. The current House size of 435 was set in 1911, and could be changed by a simple majority in both chambers and the signature of the President. But that wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. In order to get back that original 1:33,000 ratio, we would have to increase the size of the House to 9,100! With a House that size, it would take all day for just a simple roll call vote. On the other hand, we could maintain the House’s current size or increase it modestly, perhaps to a nice round 500. Either way, as the US population continues to grow, representation will become less and less local.

So we have a dilemma: If we keep the House at anything like its current size, we lose the local representation that it was supposed to accomplish, but at least we have a House of a managable size. On the other hand, we could get back our local representation by increasing the House to over 9,000, but then it would never be able to get anything done!

I’d like to say that there are all kinds of exciting proposals out there, but there simply aren’t. The size of the House of Representatives just isn’t an A-list sort of crisis. Even so, it affects the functioning and future of our government every single day. Do you have any bright ideas for solving this dilemma? Let us know!