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Enlarge the House of Representatives to Improve Governance [1]

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Date: 2022-07-10

The American House of Representatives is too small. It needs to be bigger.

At the nation’s founding, each Representative represented only ~30,000 people. Now each represents ~750,000. This later number is much higher than any other major democracy. It doesn’t take a constitutional amendment to fix it; it just takes a normal statute. This was the practice that was followed for the first 150 years of the country. The only reason the normal adjustments stopped being made was that the House of Representatives got less virtuous. They selfishly wanted to limit the number of representatives so each one had relatively more power. What is good for the individual representatives’ ego is bad for America.

Here are the benefits of House enlargement:

Each American would be represented by a person who represented fewer people. Constituents would be more likely to actually know (or know someone who knows) their representative. Congressmen and women would be “closer to their customers”.

A larger House would lessen the presidential electoral college distortion (it is distorted by the fact all states get electoral vote power by adding the population-based number of Representatives it gets plus a fixed (and thus unfair) number (two) of Senate based votes. A larger House would water down this malapportionment.

A larger House would allow Representatives to specialize more in their committee assignments. They could actually write laws rather than outsourcing the work to self-interested lobbyists or the executive branch. If the Supreme Courts completes its work of abolishing the administrative state via things like the major questions and the nondelegation doctrines, Congressional efficacy will become even more important.

In light of the above, the key good governance question is simply “how big?”. Fortunately, this can be done gradually. Taking the number up from the current 435 to 500 is +15%. That’s enough to test the good governance hypothesis without much institutional risk.

A bigger House is a better House.





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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/10/2109467/-Enlarge-the-House-of-Representatives-to-Improve-Governance

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