Constitutional Maximum for the House

Great Debates
1

I was going to post this in another thread, but instead of starting a hijack, I think I’d rather open a new discussion.

This part could make an interesting debate: should we use the Constitutional maximum number of representatives of not more than one per 30,000 free persons?

Based on the 2010 census, that’d give us 10,271 representatives. States would have between 19 and 1274 representatives.

[spoiler]Alabama 159
Alaska 24
Arizona 213
Arkansas 97
California 1242
Colorado 168
Connecticut 119
Delaware 30
Florida 627
Georgia 323
Hawaii 45
Idaho 52
Illinois 428
Indiana 216
Iowa 102
Kansas 95
Kentucky 145
Louisiana 151
Maine 44
Maryland 192
Massachusetts 218
Michigan 329
Minnesota 177
Mississippi 99
Missouri 200
Montana 33
Nebraska 61
Nevada 90
New Hampshire 44
New Jersey 293
New Mexico 69
New York 646
North Carolina 318
North Dakota 22
Ohio 384
Oklahoma 125
Oregon 128
Pennsylvania 423
Rhode Island 35
South Carolina 154
South Dakota 27
Tennessee 211
Texas 838
Utah 92
Vermont 21
Virginia 267
Washington 224
West Virginia 62
Wisconsin 190
Wyoming 19

Computed using the method described at https://www.census.gov/population/apportionment/about/computing.html on census numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_Census[/spoiler]Benefits of a legion of congress-critters:

  1. Representatives more responsive to constituents. The economic needs of the people of your district are going to be a lot more important than ideological purity.
  2. Easier to get elected with less money. Smaller districts means campaigning is less expensive, so there’s less dependence on fund-raising.
  3. Grass-roots works better. When your district has only a little over 30,000 people, small and well-organized groups can have a large impact.
  4. Harder to gerrymander. We’d still benefit from regulations restricting gerrymandering, but small districts make it more difficult to get exactly the right balance of voters to benefit a particular party. And it’d be riskier, since small changes in demographics could easily flip a district.
  5. More proportional Electoral College. The representation of each state will be much closer to its population.

Drawbacks to a large number of representatives:

  1. Logistics. Congress would need a small stadium to convene as a whole.
  2. Personal connections. It’s a lot harder to make personal connections when you’re one of thousands.

There’s probably more to be said for either side. I’m in favor of increasing the size of Congress, all the way to the Constitutional maximum. I don’t think the drawbacks are significant compared to the benefits. There’s little need for the entire Congress to meet in one location at one time. Voting can be done remotely.

While it’ll be harder for individual representatives to make personal connections, they’ll have to make them, because nothing will get done without many of them working together. We’d see many caucuses forming, some across party lines. For example, representatives from major ports would be aligned with Midwest grain farmers on trade issues, even if they disagreed on many other issues. The culture of Congress would have to change, but since the current culture is toxic, I’m not seeing that as a problem.

What does anyone else think?

Addendum: if we’re going to change the size of the House, I’d also like to increase the Senate to three senators per state. Simply so that each state has one senate election for each Congress.

2

Well, RFK Stadium is sitting empty, and there is no real plan for doing anything with it.

And they could put a boxing ring (or MMA octagon) in the center of the field for settling disputes - by combat!

3

I think the logistics (and staff costs) would make this a terrible idea.

The solution seems worse that the problem. And, FWIW, I don’t think the number of Representatives is a serious problem.

4

Very unlikely to happen, but I think this is a great idea. More connection with representatives means better representation. Less money would be needed to win elections.

5

Another benefit – gerrymandering is much, much more difficult.

6

Yes. Accompany this with drastic cuts in compensation and staffing. Doesn’t seem likely to become politically feasible, though.

Politics on the national level has become cartoonish. It’s harder to caricature someone on one issue when you are working with them on another. The coalitions that develop could be interesting.

7

Other than the fact that the current majority is held by people I disagree with, what’s the problem people are seeing with the way Congress is set up? Would we get better people if there were 10,000 of them?

I guess I don’t get the Trump/Sanders critique that our system is broken. In my view, the system is fine. The good guys aren’t winning elections, that’s the problem.

8

Wow, we actually agree on something.

I’d be fine with cuts in compensation (though not too much – I wouldn’t want only the wealthy to be able to run for office) and staffing if we got a much larger congress in its place.

Maybe there’d be a revenue-neutral way to do it, depending on how much Congressfolks get right now to fund their staffs.

9

This would get rid of gerrymandering (or at least make it much, much more difficult).

10

How would this give better representation? Sure the congressman would be closer to the ear of the people, but he’s got to go convince 5,135 people he is only going to occasionally interact with to go along with him.
Which means either parties or caucuses ultimately are going to be where the power resides, even more so than they do today just from a sheer logistics point of view.
And if all 10,271 representatives need to deliver something to answer their constituents that’s going to be pressure for government to provide more and more services to smaller groups.
Not saying that’s a bad thing individually but collectively that gets expense.
What problem is this solving?

11

I think the logistics problems are solvable. I work in a large company. Inter- and intra-office communication is easy. There’s no reason Congress couldn’t update how it operates. Most of the real work of Congress is done in committee. With a large Congress, it’d be sub-committees that’d do the real work.

Staffing costs wouldn’t have to be a problem. With ten thousand representatives, instead of staff doing the grunt work, have the representatives do it. :wink: But even if we kept the same staffing allocation per member of congress, the cost is a pittance compared to the overall budget. While reasonable people might argue that better congressional representation isn’t worth that cost, I think it is.

I do think the number of representatives is a problem. We’re at something like 700,000 people per district. While modern communications make it easier to connect with many people, a representative just doesn’t have enough to time to engage with more than a tiny slice of their district.

And large districts are too diverse. Diversity is good, in general. But when a representative has constituents from all over the map (figuratively and literally), it’s difficult to represent everyone equally well. Going down to 30,000 people per district greatly reduces the variety of viewpoints needed to be considered. And so everyone’s viewpoints will have representation.

12

According to the link below, each Congressional office gets between $1 and 2 million for their office budget. If we average that at $1.5 million, then that’s about 435*1.5 = $652 million that goes to House office budgets (not including salaries for the Reps themselves). Let’s say we increased the House tenfold, to about 4000 members – with the same budget for staff – $652 million / 4000 = $163K per office. That’s enough for, say, two mid-income (~$60K) staffers plus travel expenses, perhaps.

13

Some comparisons:

British House of Commons is 650 seats for 65 million people.(While it lasts)

Indian Lok Sabha is 545 for 1.3 BILLION

New Hampshire State House is 400 for 1.3 million (paid a princely $100/yr plus mileage)

14

I’m taking a longer-term view than the problems with current Congress and the current President.

With the large districts we have, representatives have to use most of their time raising money. Reducing districts to less than 1/20th their current size will greatly reduce the amount of money needed. And also reduce the importance of money, simply because community connections among your 30,000 constituents are going to be a lot more relevant than advertisements. Neighborhood canvassing will be essential when a single person can knock on every door in a reasonable time.

And that means the representatives’ connections to their community is going to be more important than party conformity. A representative from an inner-city district with poor schools is going to be pro-voucher, even if they vote Democratic the rest of the time. A representative from an affluent suburb may be in favor of gun control, even while they vote Republican on other issues. With small districts, we’d see a lot more representatives voting despite their party’s platforms.

I don’t think switching to the constitutional maximum for the House will really favor either party. Instead, it would make Congress a finer-grain picture of the US. The could well be an ugly picture. But it address the problem the representatives don’t represent their constituents very well because there’s simply too many of them.

As an aside, these are the same arguments I use against proportional representation. Some on the political left think that is a better way to elect representatives. I think it’s the exact opposite.

15

The big problem is that the 1 rep minimum greatly overvalues the low population rural states. It also greatly overvalues the rural areas of the middlin’ sized states.

When you add in gerrymandering, that will keep making it much easier for your “bad guys” to keep winning the majority of seats with far less than the majority of votes. Because the deck is stacked that way. Simply renumbering the Congressional headcount will alter the balance of power between e.g. Wyoming & California.

One thing a 10,000 person Congress would do is make Congressional districts smaller than statehouse districts. In my state of Florida the Florida house is one member per ~160,000 residents. So under the proposed change to the Federal system our Federal districts would be about 20% the headcount and size of our State districts.

With that many federal legislators all looking for something to do and some bill to sponsor I think it would go a very long way towards extending Federal reach much more deeply into what’s now considered the individual states’ bailiwicks.

Whether one considers that a good or a bad change is a personal matter.

16

Its probably the dumbest idea ever a la congress:

1)Most Congresspeople wouldn’t have committee assignments because there aren’t that many to go around…unless we want 600 member committees.

2)Gerrymandering would be easier because bad districting would be easier to hide. And it would lead the already overburdened courts to be flooded with new lawsuits.

3)Who is going to pay for all the needed accommodations and where are these people going to park

4)It would be a lot easier to bribe Congresspeople because law enforcement couldn’t possibly keep an eye on all of them

5)We would still have the Senate

6)Voter fraud would be easier in tightly knit districts

7)Lots more fringe candidates confusing elections

8)The impossibility of providing security for all of them

9)The boredom of the job leading to high turnover

17

According to the OP’s calculation, Missouri would have more representatives than it has in its state Senate and General Assembly combined.

I might entertain the idea of doubling the size of the House, but 10,000 is WAY too much.

18

Personally I’d like to see the Wyoming Rule implement, along with a non-partisan redistricting process. Also let states have multimember districts (or elect their entire delegations at-large) provided they use proportional representation.

19

Interestingly, under the “Wyoming Rule” (or the Nevada Rule if before 1960), which is that the allocation of members to state be based on multiples of the population of the smallest state, rounding up or down by halves, you still have almost the same ratio of largest to smallest district (1.81 instead of 1.88). Because, of course, you can’t have fractional representatives so the rounding error is still there, only now for the whole exercise rather than after reserving one apiece.

The Wikipedia article also shows that after 1870 and well into the 20th century, simultaneously admitting extremely sparsely populated western states and receiving high immigrant inflow back east would have triggered an uptick of total numbers with wide oscillations, reaching up to 1,862 members in 1900, heading back down upon the population movements after the 1930s.

20

There are some dysfunctions in the way Congress is set up, but I’d say that they’re mostly on the Senate side, not the House. And the Senate is a lot harder to modify. About the only advantages I see to expanding the House are that it would smooth out the minimum-one-representative and other rounding problems, and it would make the Senate part of the electoral vote calculation less significant.