For several years I accept been request former colleagues in the House of Representatives, "Why are there 435 members in the House?" They normally reply with a shrug or a brusque express joy and say, "Okay, you must know. Tell me." The number of congressional members is not mandated by the Constitution. Nor does the size of congressional districts announced in the document. The number 435 was adopted in 1929, and it was a number driven by racism, xenophobia, and the self-interest of members. Even so it could all alter with an act of Congress.

The Framers of the Constitution believed the "people'due south co-operative" of regime—the House—should abound in size as the population grew, thereby guaranteeing the people access to their elected representatives. The first Congress in 1789 had districts of 33,000 constituents; today's districts have 740,000. Districts need to exist smaller, and the membership of the House larger. That change in police would eliminate a 90-year monument to bigotry, make the House more democratic, and make the Electoral Higher more representative of the population of our country. Smaller districts, accompanied past redistricting and balloter reform, volition as well create more competitive districts, which will hateful less virulently partisan candidates—and, hopefully, legislators. Republican candidates running in cities and the suburbs will find information technology hard to exist xenophobic or to oppose reproductive rights and activeness on climate alter. Meanwhile, Democrats in rural areas will be similar the Southern Democrats I served with in the House in the 1970s and '80s: pro-business, pro-life, just likewise pro-civil rights. This may not finish political polarization, only it is a vital starting time step in reforming the Business firm.

It Started in Philadelphia

The respond to "Why 435" starts with the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and 3 contentious problems regarding the creation of the Senate and the House: the composition of the Senate; whether and how to count the enslaved population; and the size of the congressional districts.

On the start matter, James Madison had strenuously argued for proportional representation in both bodies. He believed this was essential for a strong national government. The mid-Atlantic small states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey—were obdurate: equal representation in the Senate or nil.

The second issue was how to count enslaved persons. In 1783, the Congress, desperate for revenue, sought to impose a per-state levy based on population, which raised the issue of whether and how to count the enslaved. The Southern states argued against the counting of whatever slaves because information technology would keep their revenue contribution lower; the Northern members wanted to count all slaves. Madison proposed a three-fifths compromise for revenue purposes—three out of every v of the enslaved population would exist counted. Iv years afterward, during the Constitutional Convention, the issue of how to count enslaved persons arose again. This time the event was not revenue just representation, and the positions of the North and South were reversed. By 1787, enslaved persons made upward almost twoscore pct of the populations of Maryland and the Southern states. Those states wanted to count enslaved persons in the same as "free people." Some Northern states, concerned that the Southern states would "import slaves" to increase their population and thus their number of representatives, argued that no enslaved persons should be counted. Notwithstanding others argued for some other iii-fifths dominion—three of every five enslaved persons would be counted.

Finally, they had to decide on the number of people that constituted a congressional district—and thus the size of the House of Representatives. The only fourth dimension George Washington, the convention's chairman, spoke was to argue for smaller districts of 30,000 persons versus the leading alternative of xl,000 persons.

The second matter was settled first, when, in June 1787, the iii-fifths dominion was agreed to. In July, the "Great Compromise" passed five-4, and pocket-size states were guaranteed equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House. Finally, on the last day of the convention, September 17, Washington'south smaller district choice was adopted.

The debate on the get-go affair, the size of the Firm, remained contentious during the state ramble ratifying conventions, with states arguing for more members to better constituents' access to them as well equally a ways to forbid corruption. In 1789, James Madison, and so running for a House seat, had written a entrada letter to the voters of his district promising them a "bill of rights" and a requirement to increase the size of the House. These amendments were the most important problems in his campaign for Congress confronting James Monroe, his opponent then and, 28 years afterward, his successor to the presidency. He defeated Monroe 1,308 to 972. Yep, the districts where much smaller then. Lesson learned, Congressman Madison went to New York as fellow member of the Showtime Congress and authored a series of amendments now known every bit the Pecker of Rights. His proposed Beginning Amendment was a guarantee that the House would begin with a defined number of members—which was not included in the Constitution—and would grow according to a specific formula laid out in the subpoena. It savage short of ratification by i country. Had it been ratified, the freedoms we at present relish as part of the Showtime Amendment, including oral communication and the press, would have been the Second Subpoena.

The 1920 Census: White, Rural America Reacts

For the next 120 years, from 1790-1910, membership in the House of Representatives grew equally the population increased and as new states were admitted to the Union—with the exception of 1840, when the Congress reduced the size of the Business firm membership. The Reapportionment Human action of 1911 increased House membership from 386 to 433 and immune a new member each from the Arizona and the New Mexico territories when they joined the Union. In 1912, Fenway Park opened, the Titanic sank, and the House had 435 members. Fenway Park has changed, ocean liners are ancient history—merely the House still has the same number of representatives today as information technology did and then, fifty-fifty equally the population has more than tripled—from 92 million to 325 one thousand thousand.

Afterward the 1920 Demography determined that more Americans lived in cities than in the rural areas, a nativist Congress with a racist Southern core faced its decennial responsibility of reapportioning a state that had experienced a large growth in immigrants. The population had grown in ten years by 15 percent, to 106 million. Recent immigrants lived in vibrant enclaves with their fellow countrymen. They spoke their mother tongues, shopped at ethnic stores and markets, partied at ethnic clubs, and attended ethnic plays and movies. While 85 percent of Americans were native born, Firm members debating the effects of the Census routinely referred to the big cities as "foreign" and too much similar the "old world." In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed anti-immigration legislation, the second establishing a "national origins formula" that severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Before anti-inclusion acts had already restricted clearing from Asia.

The congressional hearings held subsequently that 1920 Census exposed the country's racial separation and its urban-rural divide. The Business firm Demography Committee's starting time hearing included African-American witnesses James Weldon Johnson and Walter White of the NAACP, Monroe Trotter from the National Equal Rights League, and George H. Harvey, general counsel of the Colored Quango of Washington, who detailed the systematic discrimination against blackness voting. White testified that anyone helping blacks vote in certain Florida communities would be "subjected to mob violence." The panel demanded that Congress utilise the Fourteenth Subpoena's provisions—specifically Section two, which deals with apportionment and representation matters—to reduce a land's congressional delegation as a penalty for denying its citizens the right to vote.

The Southerners on the committee, offended by the African Americans' presence, rejected the evidence of discrimination. Representative William Larsen, Democrat of Georgia, said: "In my home, ane,365, I believe is the number, n——-due south are registered. . . . We have a white primary, which has naught to do with the general election. The n——— does non participate in the white primary." He explained that blacks choose not to vote in the general election because their party—the Republican Political party—"lacked the force to win," equally historian Charles W. Eagles put it.

Meanwhile, as Congress debated how to reapportion the country, women got the correct to vote, and alcohol was banned. Though World War I brought the country together, the stop of the war brought two years of a "cerise scare" in which labor unions and "dissenters" of all types were harassed, jailed, and deported past Woodrow Wilson's fanatical Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who feared the spread of Soviet-style Communism.

By 1924, the Ku Klux Klan had iv million members. The Klan was organized, lethal, and quickly expanding to the Westward and Midwest. This "second rising" of the Klan had begun in 1915, and its membership was anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and pro-Prohibition. In the South, the Klan was Autonomous, in the Due west and Midwest it was Republican, and everywhere its members saw a state where white Protestants were losing power and immigrants were ascendant.

In 1929, having failed to hold on how to account for the growth in the state'south population, the House prepare past law the number of members at 435, or the 1912 level. Keeping the number at 435 ensured that Congress would non recognize the changes brought about by the African-American migration and the immigrant population growth in the Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. The S and rural America, which dominated the Business firm, rejoiced. At the concluding minute, the Republican authors of the bill removed a decades-long requirement that districts exist meaty, contiguous, and of equal population. The states were now free to depict districts of varying sizes and shapes, or to elect their representatives at large. (At-large representation had really existed before, at the outset of the republic, simply was made illegal over the course of the nineteenth century.)

A Century-Plus Later on, It's Time for Change

No one would have imagined that the racist, anti-urban, arbitrary number of 435 would last, unchanged, for 108 years. Certainly not the Framers of the Constitution, who believed that the House should grow with each decennial Census. The "bargain" of 1929 that stock-still the Business firm at 435 members has immune the average size of a congressional district to grow from 230,000 people to approximately 780,000 in 2020. Communication with constituents today is more and more electronic than personal. Some members still do in-person town halls, though social media makes organizing to disrupt them easy. As the districts grow in size, the likelihood of having personal contact with House members diminishes.

During my 18 years in Congress, the thousands of unscripted, frequently poignant, crazy, and contentious moments with my constituents shaped me and gave them a adventure to take my measure. Today, members and their constituents can instantaneously communicate with each other, but a digital presence is no substitute for the existent thing. It is like watching 4th of July fireworks on your iPhone.

Then what to do? I propose nosotros do what the Founding Fathers thought made sense: Increase the size of the House of Representatives equally the population grows so that it can go representative of the people once again. I in one case raised the idea of increasing the size of the House with a prominent member. The response did non surprise me: "Oh, they don't like 435 of u.s. now. Surely they won't like more of u.s.." Probably true if the result is presented solely as increasing the size of an already extremely unpopular and little-trusted institution. Just what if the argument is not only about more members, but rather smaller and more representative districts and greater citizen access to their members? And what if the result is a more diverse group of representatives and even, possibly, a reduction in the polarization that paralyzes Congress today?

The get-go question is, what is the right size of an expanded House? The Wyoming Rule provides one model for how to make up one's mind the size of new districts. It would decrease the number of people in a congressional district to the "lowest standard unit of measurement." The Constitution provides that each state is entitled to at to the lowest degree i representative. Wyoming being currently the least populous country, its population (577,000) would be used to determine the "lowest standard unit," which would and then exist the number of people in each congressional district across the country. To make up one's mind how many total members, the population of the country is divided by the "lowest standard unit of measurement."

In 2020, the U.Due south. population is estimated to exist 330-plus million. Wyoming'south population is probable to be close to what it is today. That would hateful congressional districts of approximately 577,000 or so people. Not exactly small only significantly better than the 780,000 it is probable to be in 2020. The number of members in the Firm would increase by 142, from 435 to 577. Large enough to brand a difference, simply without existence unwieldy. The Wyoming rule has the virtue of requiring only a statutory change.

So size is the first question. But information technology is non the only question. We likewise need to talk about how to expand the House. The idea of increasing the size of the House without the necessary electoral reforms would only exacerbate the absurd outcomes we meet in states like North Carolina, where 50 per centum of the votes cast in the 2022 election were for Autonomous candidates however Republicans won 10 of the state's 13 House seats. Similar instances of gerrymandering in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are being challenged in country courts. In that location is no excuse for allowing either Democrats or Republicans to engage in partisan redistricting. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Rucho v. Common Crusade that "partisan gerrymandering claims nowadays political questions across the accomplish of the federal courts"—a shameful dereliction of the Court's responsibleness to protect the rights of all Americans to, equally the minority wrote, "participate equally in the political procedure." The Rucho decision is a return to 1940s Supreme Court reasoning that electoral questions are best left to the political sphere, which the Court had overcome by 1962, when it ruled in Baker v. Carr that such political questions were indeed within the Courtroom's purview. While we look for legislative activeness, erstwhile Attorney General Eric Holder'southward National Democratic Redistricting Committee has vigorously fought a state-by-land battle to insure that the 2022 redistricting maps are nonpartisan. In North Carolina, the group's efforts were successful recently when a iii-judge panel ruled that new nonpartisan districts must supplant the Republican gerrymandered programme.

How exercise we go on simultaneously to expand and reform? There are several thoughtful plans that could frame the argue. The identify to first is a package of election and voting reforms introduced by Maryland Autonomous Congressman John Sarbanes that includes a provision for nonpartisan commissions in the states to examine how to describe commune lines adequately. It passed the House in March, but Senate Majority Leader McConnell, unsurprisingly, will not bring it up in the Senate.

Some other possible change would be to give states the option to take some number of the added congressional seats and take them elected "at-large" on a statewide ground. Electing some members statewide will consequence in greater voter participation and more than competitive House races, which is likely to mean fewer farthermost candidates. Here's how it might piece of work. After the Census, in states receiving additional seats, parties would advance a list of statewide candidates. The total number of votes cast for all the Democrats and Republicans running in the land'south individual district races would be tallied to determine which political party's at-big candidates would exist elected. So, for example, if the votes bandage for Democrats running in all of the commune races amounted to threescore per centum of the total statewide vote—Democrats would receive 60 percent of the at-big seats, and the Republicans would get 40 percent. The at-large concept is more nuanced than this example and is most likely to make sense in more than populated states. Many states will not qualify for an at-large seat, and some will get only one or two seats, but even in those instances there would be a strong incentive to maximize individual district turnout; at-large/statewide elections will drive both parties to field candidates in every district in an try to sew together the statewide voting totals. The days of candidates running unopposed would be over. Fifty-fifty in the districts that were overwhelmingly Democratic, the Republicans would still want to field a serious candidate to increase their aggregate statewide vote full. The aforementioned would exist truthful for Democrats in strong Republican areas.

More competition for every seat will have a moderating result on both parties. In lodge to exist effective in maximizing their vote, parties will have to field candidates who entreatment to more a narrow ideological base. In a further endeavor to bulldoze upward turnout the parties might want to field at-large candidates of prominence: Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Beto O'Rouke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Michael Bloomberg and Shepard Smith in New York, Ashley Judd in Kentucky, and Madeleine Albright in Virginia.

Don't Forget the Electoral Higher

Increasing the total number of House members would also increase the size of the Electoral College past approximately 142, from 538 to 680 members.

What touch on would this take? In sum, the more than populated states would increment their number of Electoral College votes significantly. Consider a comparing of Wyoming and Florida. Today, Wyoming, with a population of 577,000, gets three electoral votes—one electoral vote per 193,000 people. Florida, meanwhile, with a population of 21.3 meg, gets 29 electors—one electoral vote for every 734,500 people. But if congressional districts were reduced from 720,000 people to 577,000, Florida would abound to 37 congressional districts, and 39 electors, while Wyoming would nonetheless have only the three. Ohio would get iv more than congressional seats, and Michigan three more. The big winners of course would exist California with 16 more seats and Texas with 15. This would translate into 71 balloter votes for California and 53 for Texas.

Of course, the small states would hate this. But the Electoral College has given pocket-size states disproportionate ability throughout our history. Likewise, of course, slave states, in the beginning: The three-fifths compromise for counting enslaved people adopted at the Constitutional Convention gave the South more than Electoral College votes, which resulted in five of the first 6 presidents being from Virginia. All v were slaveholders.

A constitutional amendment to cancel the Balloter College would exist the best way to proceed, but it's extremely unlikely. Increasing the size of the Electoral Higher would reduce the modest-state reward. The big and growing states—Florida, Texas, California, other Sun Belt states—will become more important to the issue of the presidential ballot. Whether this increase in the larger states will favor one political party over the other is not clear, simply the means by which we elect a President will certainly be more than representative of the population. And, of course, Nate Silver will have to modify the proper noun of his website.

Time for a Argue

For 140 years, the right size of congressional districts was hotly debated. All the same we haven't had a serious contend on the size of Firm districts in 90 years, during which time the state's population has more than tripled. The stasis has left united states of america an outlier among representative democracies. U.South. House districts are gigantic compared to "lower business firm" constituencies in Europe. Groovy U.k.'south Firm of Eatables has 650 members, each representing about 110,000 people. France'due south Bedroom of Deputies is 577, Germany's Bundestag is 709; both, well-nigh 100,000-plus people per constituency. The Japanese Nutrition's lower house with 465 members is the next closest in size to the U.Due south. House, simply its districts are much smaller, with about 272,000 people.

The Framers recognized that the population would grow and the country would change. The population has tripled since 1910, the demographic makeup of our country has inverse, but that modify is not matched in the makeup of the congressional membership. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, whites accounted for 81 percentage of Congress merely just 62 percent of the population. In the 2022 Congress, women make upwardly 20 percent of the membership, despite being just more than one-half the population. In the final 5 decades, the Hispanic population increased more than fivefold. Yet the percent of Hispanics in Congress, while it has grown, is nevertheless but shy of 8 percent. Expanding the Firm gives united states a chance to have a legislative branch that is representative of the people in more ways than 1.

Many have said to me that the thought of more than members is simply crazy. But what is truly crazy, sad, and inarguably objectionable is that a racist, nativist congressional decision of ninety years ago nevertheless stands. Four hundred and xxx-five members is tantamount to a Confederate Battle Flag of numbers hiding in plain sight. Patently there is no existent understanding of the Framers' intent that Firm districts abound in number equally the population increases. Where are the "strict constructionists" when nosotros actually demand them? While we contend what questions to ask on the next Census form, there appears to be little recognition that the purpose of Article 1, Department two of the Constitution was to determine the size of a growing Firm of Representatives.

Congress volition not subtract the size of districts without a fight, of course. Why would whatever member want to dilute his or her individual power and authority? Simply for commonwealth to work, democratic institutions must have the trust and support of the people. The Framers promised a people'southward Firm. Information technology is time to honor that promise. Congress owes it to the American people to revisit the decision of 435 fabricated 108 years ago and adopted into police 90 years agone.

Visit your member of Congress, ask them why there are 435 members of the House; since you lot at present know, you could educate them and the process of reform tin can begin.