The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it.

435. That's how many people are in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the legislative branch of the United States government. The country's founders expected the House to expand along with the country. But that number, 435, hasn't changed in about 100 years, even though the US population has tripled in that time frame. Some scholars think that imbalance helps explain why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them. Here's the thing that you really care about, which is, you know, whether you can get the ear of somebody who represents you, whether you can find that person in your district. The more people that person represents, the less likelihood you can get the attention of that person. >> But this one congressman thinks it's time to think bigger than 435. >> If you were going to make government more democratic, what would that look like? Why don't we continually expand the House? It's something that would make us more representative. It's something that would give more representation to the parts of the country where people actually live. >> Representative Sean Casten of Illinois has presented a bill that would continuously expand the House as the country's population grows. But will adding more seats to the House actually be a good balance of effective governance and representation, or will it only add more chaos and gridlock? So 435 isn't in the Constitution. It actually says this, "The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000, but each state shall have at least one representative." But we got rid of this idea pretty quickly. >> That seems crazy today. We would have a house that would be astronomically large if we kept that number in place. It was thought of as a guideline and the Constitution is in many ways an aspirational document. Now, what the framers did enshrine was that the census would determine the number of representatives for each state. As long as the house was aortioned or divided off of that, it was constitutional. So, for over a 100 years, we did that modestly adding seats through aortionment acts as the new states joined the union. But after World War I, the population shifted to urban centers. Black communities and immigrants with different religious beliefs were changing the landscape captured by the census. and that was a threat to those in power. >> As members of Congress are trying to create a new aortionment act after 1920 and the 1920 census, rural members stand in the way of that. They don't want to give up power. >> So after the battle between rural and urban factions, the House passed the Permanent Aortionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of representatives at 435 for the next century. Today, more than 80% of the US lives in urban areas. It's this massive over representation of rural parts of the country. Our purpose if we're a representative democracy should be to represent the people wherever they live. >> This divide is magnified by how we split that cap of 435 among the states. Because these days we use something called the Huntington Hill formula. It can get pretty complicated so I won't go over all the details. The important thing to know is that it assumes each of the 50 states has at least one seat in the House of Representatives. Then it uses a formula to divide up the remaining 385 roughly based on the state's population size as determined by the census. What gets tricky is determining which states get an extra representative when their population sizes are really close. Take Delaware and Montana. Their population sizes are similar. But after the 2020 census, the formula gave Montana an extra seat. This means that a Delaware representative speaks for nearly twice the number of constituents as a Montana representative. Is that fair? And is that the best system? For context, 761,000 constituents per representative is a way higher ratio than many other democracies around the world. This is why Representative Casten introduced new legislation to expand the House. As your districts get bigger and bigger, you have to represent a much larger, more diverse set of interests. We come to have to represent the average of those interests rather than their specificity. >> So, if you're generally convinced that we should expand the House, here comes the tricky part. Picking a new number, can't be too big, and it can't be too small. Political scientists came up with two formulas that really guided Casten's ideas for his own legislation. One of the proposals, and this is the wonkiest, probably the most accurate, is this cube root law that looks at parliamentary bodies all over the world and says, "How many people do they typically represent?" And if you squint your eyes, it sort of follows with the cube root of the population in the United States is this crazy outlier. Dismissed that because if you've tuned out once I said cube root, you understand the political problem with that as an approach. There's another approach that says you should set the size of a congressional district to be the population of the smallest state at the time of any redistricting. It's called the Wyoming rule because Wyoming for a long time has been the lowest population state. >> But Casten's bill proposes something he believes is way simpler. Commit to a specific ratio of voters per representative. And for him, that magic number is 500,000. I think the important thing is whether you do the Wyoming rule or or 500,000 or the cube root, all of these tend to lock in somewhere in the 500,000ish range. 500,000 is easy to explain and that would add somewhere 200 250 seats to the house and then say every time we redistrict, we will expand the members but keep the representation level the same. His proposal has two additional elements to ensure expanding the House is actually more representative of the electorate. The system needs multi-member districts, meaning a single congressional district could have multiple representatives for the same area. It would also need to have proportional representation, which is where seats are allocated based on the percentage of votes political parties receive. We have videos on these systems if you're interested in getting more in the weeds. Without implementing these two other systems, gerrymandering could actually get worse. >> I've done some modeling of this. If you were to bring districts down from 765,000 to about 500,000 constituents per district, you would probably make the gerrymandering problem worse. If we want to solve the gerrymandering problem, which I I think we do, combining a larger house with proportional representation is essential. So, if we manage to do all of that, this new legislative body still needs to be able to pass bills and govern, right? But if there's a lot of freshman representatives, it might be harder for them to all come to a consensus. >> I don't think that it's just talk when people express concerns that the the House could become so unwieldy as an institution such that each individual member would lose their voice. I think that's a significant impediment to increasing the size of the chamber. So much of what Congress does, and it may not be doing a whole lot, but so much of what it does is actually decided by a very small number of people, that the inner circle of the majority party makes a lot of decisions. >> So these are the power structures that will make it hard for Casten to pass his bill. He tried to pass a version of this in 2023 and it died in committee. But he's reintroducing the legislation because for him the stakes are way too high to not try again. The >> structure of our government is not designed to carry out the popular will of the majority of the American people. If we don't take steps to fix that, then we're doing nothing to shut down the cynicism that's in the American public that the government claims to represent us. We vote for them and then they don't do what we want. So we can either let that cynicism destroy the government or we can fix the government and heal the cynicism.