This is a simple argument. We need to expand congress. Actually, I think we need to expand it A LOT. Currently there are 100 Senators and 435 members in the House of Representatives. We can’t change the number of senators without adding states or radically changing the constitution… which is an entirely different thing.
The first house of representatives in 1790 had 65 members. We’ve been at 435 since 1911. In case you think this has something to do with how many states… Hawaii and Alaska didn’t become states until 1959. So what happened? As usual, a lot of things. There were issues before (and after) the Civil War and the whole “3/5ths of a person” counting thing. I would not be the least surprised if part of the problem in the 1920s (after the 1920 census, they didn’t add new members) came from racism and nationalism and just… the 1920s were kind of messed up.
Up until the 1920s every census generally saw an increase in the seats in congress as the country grew. The founders kind of set it up that as the population grew, Congress would grow. Make the House more represenative by having nice, small districts. 30,000 or 40,000 people. By the way, with a population of 330million we would have like 11,000 members of Congress…. soooo yeah that might be too small a district population. Today, if we divided the districts equally, it would be 750,000/district. And the math really begins to break down when you add in state-lines.
It does kind of start to prove the point. But just to hammer it home, let me give you some other numbers:
| country | Population | Representative Seats | Simple district Math |
| USA | 330 Million | 435 | 750k/seat |
| Great Britain (Parliment) | 67 Million | 650 | 103k/seat |
| India | 1.4 Billion | 552 | 2.5M/seat |
| Japan | 125 Million | 465 | 268k/seat |
| Denmark | 5.8 Million | 179 | 32k/seat |
| Germany | 83.2 Million | 736 | 113k/seat |
| France | 68 Million | 577 | 117k/seat |
| Russia | 146 Million | 450 | 324k/seat |
| China | 1.4 Billion | 2,924 | 478k/seat |
Avoiding the topic of “healthy” and “unhealthy” democracies here, but I do acknowledge adding Russia and China is… problematic. But when we are talking about the health of our democracy, I think we need to look at both the best examples (Denmark gets top marks in almost every study/poll I’ve ever see for “healthy democracy”) and the worst.
We haven’t increased the size of our representative body in over a century, and I think it’s exacerbating the other problems with have (two party systems, inequal voting access, two-party deadlocks, etc.). If we increased the size of our representative body (the House) to 700 seats, that would bring down that count to 471k/seat. Not half, but close. And it wouldn’t be perfect because California still has 39 million people and Wyoming only has 580k. But there is only so much that we can do about that inequality. It would still (following the same representative math we use today) give a minimum 2 seats per state.
Would that be better? I don’t actually know. I think it would be more fair, for lack of a better word. I think if we combined this with some other massively needed reforms like voting-holiday (seriously, how is this NOT a thing) and/or ranked choice voting/more parties on ballots – this puts is on a path to a better, stronger democracy we can be proud of.
Dream by Day 