That would increase the disproportionate influence of the smaller states, in both the House and the presidential election, while the Wyoming rule would make the distribution more closely aligned with each state’s population.
Not sure if this is a serious suggestion or a joke but I’ll respond as if it’s the former.
The government is arguably too large. But we’re talking about a few dozen people, which is not even a drop in the bucket of the twenty-four million government employees in this country. And less than five percent of the federal budget is money paid to federal employees. So eliminating a handful of members of Congress would have no noticeable impact on the size of the government budget.
If you want to shrink the government, make a suggestion that would have some real effect (I’d suggest in another thread). If you want to reduce the size of the House of Representatives, come up with a better reason.
That’s not even wrong.
Much of the problem with the EC is the doubly disproportionate influence of the small states which have both too many senators and too many representatives for their tiny supply of citizens.
Using e.g. the Wyoming rule totally eliminates the second source of disproprotionate influence. it’s a total solution to that part of the problem.
Now you’re right it doesn’t fix the Senate. And it also doesn’t fix the winner-take-all accounting used to allocate the EC votes. So it’s not a total solution to all the representation defects in the USA’s design and to all the presidential voting defects in the USA’s design. But it goes a very large way to eliminating one of the major problems.
I’m not opposed to expanding the House, but I think it’s largely a solution in search of a problem, and I strongly suspect that the reflexive anti-government response (whaddya mean sending more politicians to Washington?!?!) would not be worth whatever small benefit that would be gained.
This is the kind of thing that sounds like it should be more proportional, but may not be in practice. It definitely wouldn’t have been in 2012, when the freshly-gerrymandered map would have elected Mitt Romney despite his near-4% loss in the popular vote.
I feel more equalized representation is a good thing as a general principle. And as a practical issue, unequal representation has been a contributing factor to a lot of political problems which we’ve been experiencing.
I’d argue it’s not more equalized while still past-the-post by district. Just more Ds and Rs redistributed slightly.
I feel that’s off topic but as long as you’ve brought it up, I’ll respond.
In my opinion, third party supporters in the United States are seeing a broad base to their ideologies that simply doesn’t exist. Third parties are not being held down by a conspiracy of the two big parties. Third parties just don’t have any wide support.
There’s nothing stopping Americans from voting for Libertarians or Greens or Socialists or whatever. But the overwhelming majority of American voters don’t want to; they see the Democrats or the Republicans are answering their needs.
This means that no change in political procedures will put third party candidates in office unless you abandon democracy and simply assign people to office based on some artificial system of how you think people should be voting.
If we had some system like ranked choice voting or mixed-member proportional representation or approval voting or compulsory voting, we’d end up with the same results; virtually all our elected offices would be held by a Democrat or a Republican.
Just FWIW the US House does not have assigned desks as such either, except for the senior leadership.
I’ve advocated for the Wyoming rule before and still agree with it, for the same core reason: more weighting of power to states with higher populations.
Something that is not oft talked about is in the late 19th century / early 20th century, there was a degree to which we “packed the Senate” some of those huge empty states that used to be territories, were carved up into individual states specifically with a mind towards the fact it would give the party then in power two more Senators based on the sectional politics of the era. The political party and coalitions involved have changed tremendously since then, but it wasn’t an amazingly good faith / great idea back then, and it has terrible consequences now–specifically of making us a much more minoritarian country than is appropriate for a modern democracy. In fact to some degree it’s a major impediment to us transitioning our system to be a proper modern democracy. Anything that can undermine this state of affairs is a good thing.
Right – the established Establishment ( 
) was already worried about how the industrial states in the NE and along the Lakes were growing fast in population so they’d dominate the House with people beholden to urban interests.
I’ve advocated for the constitutional maximum for the size of the House.
Basically, you divide a state’s population by 30,000, drop any fraction, and that’s how many representatives it gets in the House. I haven’t worked it out for the 2020 census, but it’ll definitely be more than 10,000 representatives. So about a factor of 20 more than now.
Drawback: Many representatives, but I think the pandemic has show that Congress doesn’t need to physically meet in the whole in order to get business done. Furthermore, work that is currently done by staffers could be done by elected representatives instead. And lobbyists will have a harder time and need more money to influence.
Benefit: extremely small districts are easier to contact every potential constituent by canvassing or mail, while making mass-market advertising even more inefficient or ineffective. A candidate’s local connections will be more important than their advertising budget. And outside advertising doesn’t work well when you personally know your representative.
Benefit: local groups will easily be able to get their district’s and representative’s attention. Local connections are far more influential than money.
Benefit: gerrymandering is a lot harder when districts are small. We still need more anti-gerrymandering legislation, of course. But where there’s one gerrymandered district that stretches from rural to urban, it’s very hard to draw 20 districts that do the same.
Benefit: greater diversity in Congress. One representative per 700,000 people just can’t capture the diversity within a district.
Benefit: less reason to vote based on ideology and more based on the local concerns of district. Party-line whipping is extremely difficult in large caucuses. A representative will go against their party when legislation negatively impacts their district, when a challenger only has to convince 15,000 people that they’re not representing their constituents.
Benefit: Electoral College more proportional to population. The Senate’s effect will drop from about one fifth to about one hundredth.
All of these effects will still apply if the House is increased to 1,000 instead of 10,000. I’m in favor of any increase. But I think there’s a strong case for going all the way–it will reconnect Congress to the people it represents.
I’m confused. The rest of your post seems to be making the opposite argument. You outline the benefits of greatly expanding the membership of the House. Are you saying you want a constitutional maximum for the size of a district?
Read what you quoted again. 
From the Constitution:
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;
That’s the Constitutional maximum size of the House.
Note that while this definitely benefits large states, and puts them on an equal footing with Wyoming, it negatively impacts House representation of smaller states with ~1.49x Wyoming’s representation (i.e, North Dakota).
Based on 2020 districting California has one rep/ 761k population. North Dakota has one rep/ 779k.
So from a strict “House representation fairness” issue (ignoring the disparity between Senate and EC apportionment between small and large states), the Wyoming rule fixes large states, but makes certain smaller state problems worse.
Any system that rounds off numbers is going to have some states that round down from x.49 and some states that round up from x.51. Is there some mathematical reason I’m missing that would bias this towards more populous states?
To use your example, North Dakota has a population that is 1.35 times the size of Wyoming’s and this would round off to one representative. But South Dakota has a population that is 1.54 times the size of Wyoming’s and that rounds up to two representatives (which is better than the one representative South Dakota has under the existing system). And while California rounds up to sixty-nine representatives with a population that is 68.51 times a large as Wyoming’s, Florida rounds down to thirty-seven representatives with a population that is 37.38 times as large as Wyoming’s.
The trouble is that that would move the effects of gerrymandering to the presidential election. It’s major effect would be to give some of NY and CA’s EVs to the Republicans.
I feel any electoral college votes lost to the Republicans in some states would be made up for by votes gained by the Democrats in other states.
Unless we build a new Capitol, I agree that the building chamber size is the practical limitation here. We might be able to expand the House by a few dozen extra reps, but that would be it.
My own proposal would be that the population of the least populous state be the defining unit. Right now, that’s Wyoming (roughly 579,000 people,) and Wyoming gets just one representative. So a state like Montana (population 1.1 million) would get two representatives (“two Wyomings”) and a state like California gets 68 representatives (“68 Wyomings.”)
If anything it would end up giving Republican votes to Democrats. It would be very difficult to gerrymander Texas in such a way that Houston didn’t have the EV for the district its in going to the Ds. That is true of pretty much any state most have a large metro area that dominates the state and unless the population is such that twice as many people live rural as live urban the urban people should end us getting at least one EV in states where they used to get none. While it’s true that California, New York and Illinois would end up giving several of their EVs to the Rs on the balance I think that most current red states giving up one EV would balance out to give an edge to the Ds.
Why? We could take all of the office space in the capitol and use it to expand the house chambers and then build a simple office building next door. Each member of Congress has ~5 members of their staff so the building should at least be able to fit 5x the current number of congress critters.
It would dilute – but not eliminate – the smaller states’ higher weighting in the electoral college. To pull a number out of thin air, with 750 representatives and 100 senators, 850 votes total, and Wyoming forever at 3, there is less influence than 532/3.