Does America Need a Bigger House of Representatives?

Even as the red wave forecast by Republicans failed to arrive, the 2022 election is far from over. With the results still being tallied, there is a band of reformers who are more focused on how many representatives the House includes rather than who controls it. In an essay published this week in the Harvard Gazette, a professor at that school, Danielle Allen, argues that the House needs to expand from the 435 seats it includes today. She declares that “it’s time to let Congress grow again so that it can meaningfully shift in shape with the population.”Mrs. Allen heads Our Common Purpose, which describes itself as a “Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship” and is based out of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at Cambridge. In 2020, it issued “31 recommendations for strengthening democracy.” It hopes to make progress on this laundry list by America’s 250th birthday in 2026.The Framers intended the size of the House to be tied to the demographics of the nation. Article I Section 2 of the Constitution reads that “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers.”From the founding until the early 20th century, the “People’s House” grew apace with America’s burgeoning population. That increase halted with the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which froze the House’s roster at its current level.As a treatise from Our Common Purpose, “The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives,” puts it, this cap means that the average district swelled from “around 35,000 constituents per district in the 1790s to 210,000 in the 1910s to 762,000 in 2020.” The House grew from 59 members in 1789 to 435 in 1913, where it has remained ever since. In 55 Federalist, James Madison wrote that “no political problem is less susceptible of a precise solution than that which relates to the number most convenient for a representative legislature.” The only time George Washington participated in the Constitutional Convention was to urge that districts be small.Today, Mrs. Allen notes, “both the German Bundestag and the U.K. Parliament are larger than our House of Representatives, even though their populations are roughly a quarter or a fifth of ours.” She sees expanding the House as a prelude to restoring a “principle of elasticity and flexibility to the Electoral College.” In other words, because the number of electors is tied to the number of representatives and senators, increasing the former would ensure that “California, Florida, Texas, and New York could get their fair share” of votes. This would “rectify the legitimacy problem currently developing around the Electoral College.” Republicans are unlikely to agree.In 58 Federalist, Madison wrote of the need to “readjust, from time to time, the apportionment of representatives to the number of inhabitants.” However, the Framer did warn that the “more multitudinous a representative assembly may be rendered, the more it will partake of the infirmities incident to collective meetings of the people.”While the number of seats in the House of Representatives is not established by the national parchment, one of the Constitution’s sternest prohibitions is in respect of the Senate. Article V mandates that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate,” a provision that the Constitution ordains may not be amended.A 2008 study by a political science professor, Brian Frederick, used a series of “multivariate models” to determine “whether citizens in more heavily populated House districts have less access to their representatives and are less likely to approve of their performance.” He found that they did, on both counts. One person who would agree with that finding was a representative of Alabama, William Bankhead, who disapproved of the 1929 law, which he lambasted as the “abdication and surrender of the vital fundamental powers vested in the Congress of the United States by the Constitution itself.”

Does America Need a Bigger House of Representatives?

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