More Seats!

I see that the editors of the New York Times have jumped on my bandwagon:

We’re nearly two decades into the 21st century, so why is America still operating with a House of Representatives built for the start of the 20th?

The House’s current size — 435 representatives — was set in 1911, when there were fewer than one-third as many people living in the United States as there are now. At the time, each member of Congress represented an average of about 200,000 people. In 2018, that number is almost 750,000.

This would shock the Constitution’s framers, who set a baseline of 30,000 constituents per representative and intended for the House to grow along with the population. The possibility that it might not — that Congress would fail to add new seats and that district populations would expand out of control — led James Madison to propose what would have been the original First Amendment: a formula explicitly tying the size of the House to the total number of Americans.

The amendment failed, but Congress still expanded the House throughout the first half of the nation’s existence. The House of Representatives had 65 members when it was first seated in 1789, and it grew in every decade but one until 1920, when it became frozen in time.

There’s a solution, which involves adding 158 new seats to the House of Representatives, making it proportionally similar to most modern democracies. To understand the implications of a larger House, we enlisted software developer Kevin Baas and his Auto-Redistrict program to draw 593 new congressional districts for the entire country. (Read on for an explanation of how we chose that number.) Then we used historical partisan scores to determine which party would win each district.

They need to check their math. The population of France is 67 million and the number of deputies is 577. For the U. S. to have about the same degree of representativeness as France we’d need more than 2,000 representatives in the House. The figures for Germany and the U. K. are similar. The frequent reaction to that is that it’s impractical to which I have two responses:

1. Good
2. That’s the argument for federalism. We’re just too big to have a highly centralized government like those of France, Germany, and the U. K.

But welcome aboard, anyway. A journey of 10,000 miles, etc. Start by adding 158. Then another 300. Then another 600.

And don’t get me started on the Senate. The Senate was intended to represent the governments of the states and the states themselves not the people of the states. When do we acknowledge that the 17th Amendment was a tremendous error? Repeal it or amend the Constitution to abolish the Senate.