The increasingly undemocratic nature of the House of Representatives...

[Humanist_Activist]

I will say I'm partially inspired by Creekdog's thread to post this, to focus on the part of our legislature that has come, or is supposed to be, the people's house, where the people's representatives are elected to pass laws.

I won't go too much into what the founding fathers intended for the HOR except to say that, according to the Constitution, its supposed to be proportional, at least in theory, with population(excluding 2/5s of slaves, only 3/5s counted). Various amendments, a civil war, etc. have made the House more democratic, and technically it should have been more proportional in theory, but of course, real life collides with that ideal. The HOR's demographics should, ideally, reflect the demographics of the nation at large, but it doesn't.

There is a more fundamental problem and its reflected in the enshrinement of one number, 435. As I think everyone knows, this is the maximum number of Representatives allowed in the HOR, it can never be more except temporarily. What many people seem to forget though is that this number was not set by either the Constitution or any Amendment, but rather by a public law, a reapportionment act from 1911.

Before this time, Reapportionment Acts were passed by Congress everytime a census was completed and tabulated, to calculate how many Representatives will be needed for the next decade or so. However, after the 1911 act, for the first time, Congress failed to pass a similar act in 1920, so after this they changed the rules in 1929 so that reapportionment wouldn't require a new law every 10 years or so, and it permanently fixed the amount of representatives to 435.

Since then, after every census, states either gain or lose seats in the house depending on how fast or slow they increase their population, oh, and never mind the fact that since then, we added 2 new states to the country, and nearly tripled our population since that time. The result has been shenanigans such as gerrymandering on unprecedented scales, less responsive representatives, and a ballooning of the amount of campaign funds needed to just get elected to the House of Representatives.

When the final law, that permanently enshrined 435 as the maximum number of Representatives to represent us was enacted, there were approximately 121 million people living in this country. That's one Representative elected to represent about 279 thousand people. Compare that to today, where our country has about 318 million people, so its more like 1 representative for every 718 thousand people. As the proportions widen, the less the House will be proportional to the people, or will represent our needs, on either national or local levels.

Campaign finance reform is all well and good, but it still won't solve the initial problem of requiring millions of dollars to just become a serious contender in a single House race. Nor will that Representative ever be a neighbor, and indeed, may not represent you at all due to the districting system, which allows for marginal majority, overall minority rule in many cases. If you split a bunch of different demographics up so that they are ALWAYS in a district where they are in a 49% minority, then you can end up with a House that is composed of Representatives with a veto proof majority that only represent anywhere from 50 to 20% of the population at large. Is that what the House is supposed to work? In addition, the bigger the districts get, the worse the gerrymandering will get.

Solutions to these problems are varied, campaign finance reform, removing the cap from the House, abolishing the districting system for the House and replacing it with other schemes, such as multi-candidate districts/state elections, various ideas for proportional representation, etc. The interesting thing is this, NONE of these reforms, outside of the campaign finance reform(due to SCOTUS) require anything as drastic as an Amendment. The Constitution left the HOW of electing Representative up to the States, so they can reform their systems as they see fit, and the cap, as I mentioned above, was a public law that can be abolished by a succeeding Congress.

Whether any of these reforms will actually take place, I don't know, I don't even know if its practical on a political level.

[KamaAina]

1. "permanently enshrined 435 as the maximum number of Representatives to represent us"

I always wondered about that.

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Why_435.htm

Having successfully disregarded the Constitutional requirement to reapportion the House, Congress then put our government on the path to oligarchy by passing the “Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929” which established that, henceforth, the size of the House would be permanently fixed at “the then existing number of Representatives”. The “then existing number” being a verbose and inconspicuous way to specify 435. (This act also specified the particular mathematical method to be used in apportioning that fixed number of seats based upon the decennial Census results.)

Good luck getting the House to revisit that and admit new members into its club. Regardless of who controls it.

[Humanist_Activist]

2. Yeah, a lot of people think both that and the districting system are in the Federal Constitution...

neither are, the Constitution was not a document of minutiae, it was a document that gave a broad outline of how the Federal Government was to be structured, it left a lot of the ways it can be accomplished up to the States. Hence why, for example, most Senators were appointed up until the late 19th century, but some were popularly elected in the States that allowed that. It took a Constitutional Amendment to make it national.

[Gothmog]

3. The issue is not the number of members of the House but the gerrymandering

In 2012, Democratic candidates for the House received over one million more votes than Republican candidates for the House but due to gerrymandering after 2010 census, the GOP won a majority of the House. In order for the Democrats to retake control of the House, we need to win by more than 3% to 4% of the popular vote. That is why retaking the House in 2014 is almost impossible absent a wave election where the country rebels against the GOP.

Absent non-partisan redistricting requirements, the party who wins control of the state legislatures every 10 years will have an advantage. 2010 was a midterm election where the GOP has an advantage but 2020 will be a presidential year where the Democrats should have a more even playing field or might have an advantage. Hopefully, after the 2020 elections, the Democrats can put into place some non-partisan redistricting procedures to lessen this issue in the future.

[Igel]

4. Even in a pristine system it's still possible for 1 party to predominate in the vote and lose.

Imagine this.

There are 9 winners in an election in 9 jurisdictions. 4 are (D). 5 are (R).

Each jurisdiction is composed of precisely 100,000 voters, all of whom vote.

In the 4 (D) jurisdictions, 90% of the voters go (D), for a total of 360k voters.

In each of the 5 (R) jurisdictions, 60% of the voters are (R), for a total of 300k voters.

In total, across all jurisdictions, 560k voters voted (D) and 340k voters went (R).

This can happen without gerrymandering. All that's required is that the distribution of voters be sufficiently non-random. We can assume that without gerrymandering they are randomly apportioned, but that's conterfactual. The distribution of voters, if you will, is very much non-random.

Gerrymandering makes the non-randomness worse. However, in many cases the gerrymandering bears the imprimatur of donkey's hooves. It was only after it became a vexation to (D) and an embarrassment (not to mention an impossibility) that it was suddenly no longer--and suddenly had never been--a (D) practice.

[BlindTiresias]

5. Good luck fixing it

Expect fierce bipartisan anger about "dismantling the constitution and the GENIUS of the founding fathers!"