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 …read more