The case for expanding the House of Representatives

Imagine you live in a city with 35,000 people. There’s a pothole in the street in front of your house and you can’t get anyone to come fix it, so you decide to call the mayor.

How easy do you think it would be to get a response?

As any resident of a small city can tell you, it’s pretty darn easy. If you can’t reach the mayor at City Hall, you’ll probably run into them or a staffer at the coffee shop or the post office, and they’ll get that pothole fixed. That’s one reason why local elected officials are more trusted in polls than state and federal officials.

Now, imagine that city has 750,000 people. And the mayor lives 3,000 miles away. And they spend as much as four hours a day talking to donors. Not as likely to get a response, right?

Those two scenarios are the difference between the House of Representatives as it was designed and the way it works today, thanks to a quirk in a 95-year-old law. For more than a century after America’s founding, Congress increased the size of the House every 10 years after the Census. But in 1929, the House, nervous about an influx of recent immigrants, decided to limit its size to 435 members permanently.

There are now 200 million more Americans, but still the same number of representatives, which means each member of the House represents more and more people. In 1793, the average House member represented 37,000 people, or basically the number of people in a small city. Today, they represent 768,000 — roughly as many people as live in Seattle.

This has had all kinds of deleterious effects: It boosts the cost of House campaigns, makes gerrymandering easier, raises barriers to political newcomers, increases partisanship and hurts constituent services, among other things. The cumulative effect has helped make Congress less responsive to voters and less trusted overall.

Now, two members of the House want to fix that. And they may get further with this idea because of who they are. Democratic Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine are proposing a bipartisan task force to consider reforms to the House, including nonpartisan open primaries, independent redistricting commissions, multiple-member districts and increasing the size of the House, as first reported by NOTUS.

These ideas are not new. But Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden are not your typical reform-minded liberal lawmakers. They are the co-chairs of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of conservative Democrats. She just won re-election in a district that typically favors Republicans by 5 points; he won in one that favors them by 6 points, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index.

This resolution isn’t likely to go anywhere in this Congress or the next. But if the two of the most conservative Democrats are willing to put their names on a resolution when Republicans control the White House and Congress, that’s a sign that they wouldn’t object if Democrats chose to move ahead with some of these ideas the next time they’re in power. And since conservative Democrats are often the most skittish about big reforms to how Congress operates, that’s a big deal.

All of the ideas outlined in the resolution are worth exploring, but expanding the House may be the smartest, simply because it’s the easiest to explain. One obstacle reformers face is that discussion of redistricting or nonpartisan open primaries often requires getting into the weeds. It’s easy for opponents to throw sand in the gears by confusing voters, as when an Ohio state board approved confusing wording for an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure that failed in November. Congressional laws that require state-level implementation — as changes to primary elections would — can also get tripped up.

But “make the House bigger” — or even “make House districts smaller” — fits on a bumper sticker. And Congress can do it with a simple vote to increase the size of the House and redistribute the number of members in each state, according to their population, probably after the 2030 Census.

The obvious question is: How big should the House be?

If you were an originalist and wanted the average House district back to what it was in 1793, you’d have a House with 9,000 members, which makes the Galactic Senate in the “Star Wars” prequels seem cozy. A better ratio comes from political science, where research has found that in peer nations, the lower legislative chamber’s size is typically not far from the cube root of the total population. By that standard, the House would have around 700 members, instead of 435.

But really, any number will do. Simply lifting the cap and letting the House go back to the way things were done for the first 140 years of the country would be a good start.