When a family grows it is normal and expected that they get a bigger place to live. A couple that decides they want to have 4 kids doesn’t let the size of their current house decide how many kids they have.
Why should a republic allow the size of a building determine how well its democracy works?
When our country was founded a congressional district held 33,000 citizens. Some of the founding fathers wanted it to be 40,000 citizens. George Washington famously did not speak up much during the Constitutional Convention, but he did then, and said he thought it should be 30,000. A few years later when he was President he used his first ever Presidential Veto on a bill that would have allowed for districts to be larger.
Today there is one congressional representative for every 760,367 citizens, and the single biggest reason is because in 1911 the Apportionment Act capped the US House at 435 members.
The result is that as our country’s population has grown, each district has grown very large….too large in my view.
Now, James Madison in the Federalist Papers did argue that size isn’t always an improvement, and he is correct, but at 760,000 people/representative we have absolutely lost the entire point of the US House, which was to keep it close to the people and have it be filled with regular people.
The way it stands right now, only multi-millionaires can run for Congress, backed by massive campaign war chests stocked by corporations and billionaires. The founders may have been okay with that for the upper chamber of the Senate, but that is not what the vision was for the US House.
What I would propose is a 1,000 member US House of Representatives, and completely re-design and re-build the US Capitol Building as needed.
A 1,000 member US House is still not in keeping with the original 30,000 residents/district member body that the founders created, but it’s still a huge improvement.
District size would go from 760,000 to 332,000, bringing our representatives that much closer to the people. I do not however think we should return to the original 30,000/member size, as that would result in an 11,000+ member body, and I cannot begin to imagine how a Speaker of the House and Majority and Minority Leaders would manage.
But maybe managing it is an antiquated idea. Maybe if we did the 11,000 member body it could be 100% virtual, the congressional representatives all stay in their districts 100% of the time and just vote on stuff and do their oversight duties remotely? Food for thought.
Perry Waag 