How The House Got Stuck At 435 Seats

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Apportionment, or the process of determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, happens like clockwork at this point. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts how many people each state has and then uses that number to calculate how many representatives each state gets out of the 435 seats.1 In April, for instance, we learned from the reapportionment process that California would lose a seat for the very first time while Texas would gain two.

But despite some states losing seats while others pick them up, the reapportionment process is itself now fairly mundane. That wasn’t always the case, though.

“The first presidential veto was used on the apportionment law, so it’s been a hot issue from the very, very beginning,” said Margo Anderson, a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies the social and political history of the census. In fact, until the House was capped at 435 seats2 by the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act, each apportionment period was regularly accompanied by clashes over how to best divvy up political power in Congress — including the size of the House.

On the one hand, it’s probably a good thing that Congress is no longer debating the size of the House every 10 years. After all, the reason we have the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act in the first place is that Congress was unable to reach an agreement on how to reapportion the House for nearly a decade.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/

[The Revolution]

1. I keep saying we need a new reapportionment act

Setting the house to 435 members permanently was a mistake. Instead they should pass a new act that caps the size of a district. This still keeps the process automatic, so it doesn't need to be debated every 10 years.

For example, give each state 1 seat per 500,000 in population. This would raise the house to about 662 seats.

Because electoral votes are based on house + senate seats, this increase dilutes the unrepresentative portion (the senate seats) and should bring the popular and electoral votes closer into alignment. It also makes the distribution of house seats more equitable.

And it just requires passing a law. This is far more feasible than unrealistic plans for constitutional ammendments to abolish the electoral college, or fragile and possibly unconstitutional compacts between states.

[bottomofthehill]

2. The Wyoming rule from Wiki

The Wyoming Rule is a proposal to increase the size of the United States House of Representatives so that the standard representative-to-population ratio would be that of the smallest entitled unit, which is currently the State of Wyoming.[1][2][3] Under Article One of the United States Constitution, each state is guaranteed at least one representative. If the disparity between the population of the most and least populous states continues to grow, the disproportionality of the U.S. House of Representatives will continue to increase unless the body, whose size has been fixed at 435 since 1929, except for a brief period from 1959 to 1963, is expanded.

A total of 547 seats would have been required to implement the Wyoming Rule based on the 2010 United States Census results. However, the decade leading up to the 2020 United States Census saw Wyoming's population increase at a lower rate than that of the rest of the United States; as a result, the required House size to implement the Wyoming Rule will increase to 573. Under the Wyoming Rule, California would gain the most seats with seventeen more members than it will have after the next reapportionment.

While a larger House size will generally result in the smallest and largest districts being proportionally closer in size, this is not always the case. Therefore, in some cases, the Wyoming Rule may actually result in an increase in the ratio of the sizes of the largest and smallest districts. After the 1990 United States Census and with a House size of 435, the largest district (Montana's at-large congressional district) had 799,065 residents, 76.1654% larger than the smallest district (Wyoming's at-large congressional district) with 453,588 residents. The Wyoming Rule would have given a House size of 545 in 1990 if the former method of seat apportionment had been used. With that size, the largest district (North Dakota's at-large congressional district) would have had 638,800 residents, 91.7835% larger than the smallest districts (Delaware's two districts), at approximately 333,084 residents each.