Size of House of Representatives

[Ekiqa]

I found out last night that the size of the HoR is 453, and that that number has not been changed since about 1910.

Each representative represents, therefore, nearly 750,000 people. When the number was set, each only represented around 300,000. When the House was formed originally, there were only about 30,000 per, whilst in Canada, each MP represents about 100,000 people, except for the territories. And they add MP's to go along with the increasing population.

My question is, should the US HoR be increased in number, so that the individual voters get a larger share of the vote?

Increased numbers of Reps. would make it costlier for companies to bribe and lobby, having to spend more on more people.

Now obviously, it would be impossible to fit them all in the current hall, but it could be done a la Westminster, where there is only enough seats for about 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the MPs.

Pro's, cons?

[Patrick Degan]

Four hundred thirty five —you transposed two numbers.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I've been in favour for a long time of increasing the House up to its constitutionally allotted minimum number of voters per representative (about 30,000), and thus bringing the total number of representatives to around 10,000, and seating them all in a stadium. Then the House could adopt internal rules banning all members from introducing legislation except for the Committee Chairs, streamlining the process (and preventing useless pork legislation to a large degree) so that the House could still function with 10,000 members. Which incidentally was the number Aristotle, IIRC, believed ideal for a democratic assembly.

[SCRawl]

I've been in favour for a long time of increasing the House up to its constitutionally allotted minimum number of voters per representative (about 30,000), and thus bringing the total number of representatives to around 10,000, and seating them all in a stadium. Then the House could adopt internal rules banning all members from introducing legislation except for the Committee Chairs, streamlining the process (and preventing useless pork legislation to a large degree) so that the House could still function with 10,000 members. Which incidentally was the number Aristotle, IIRC, believed ideal for a democratic assembly.

Some quick math tells me that increasing the size of Congress like that would cost about $1.4 billion per year (assuming no one takes a pay cut, and not counting anything other than their direct salaries). That sounds a little expensive to me.

[Kodiak]

Some quick math tells me that increasing the size of Congress like that would cost about $1.4 billion per year (assuming no one takes a pay cut, and not counting anything other than their direct salaries). That sounds a little expensive to me.

Perhaps decreasing the average congressional salary would be in order?

[CmdrWilkens]

Alternatively just start by doubling the durn number and work upwards from there. DC may be an expensive office market but when the government already owns 40% of the space getting folks a spot to work at might not be so hard.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Didn't they cap the number in 1919 because they'd reached the maximum safe occupancy for the House chamber?

[Uraniun235]

I've been in favour for a long time of increasing the House up to its constitutionally allotted minimum number of voters per representative (about 30,000), and thus bringing the total number of representatives to around 10,000, and seating them all in a stadium. Then the House could adopt internal rules banning all members from introducing legislation except for the Committee Chairs, streamlining the process (and preventing useless pork legislation to a large degree) so that the House could still function with 10,000 members. Which incidentally was the number Aristotle, IIRC, believed ideal for a democratic assembly.

If we're going to introduce such a radical change, why not ditch the stadium and link them all via telecommunications? Does it really matter to have them all in the same place once we have ten thousand people?

Also what was it about 10,000 that Aristotle thought advantageous?

[Pablo Sanchez]

Perhaps decreasing the average congressional salary would be in order?

The issue with all of this is that you would have to convince the representatives to vote in favor of cutting their own pay and making themselves less influential individually. To get that done it might be necessary to go over their heads with a constitutional amendments at the level of the states.

Meanwhile, putting power in the hands of the committee chairs as Marina suggested was accomplished de facto by the GOP between 1994 and 2006. There's a cute chapter in Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement where he describes how the Republican-controlled House did business around the time of Katrina. The committee chairs controlled all substantive legislation and mostly carried it out in meeting rooms, while the average Representative was limited to naming post offices and parks in honor of famous citizens of his or her state.