Expand The House & Pass The Equal Representation Amendment

While visiting the FDR State Historic Site, I saw something slightly-off in front of FDR’s Warm Springs house (preserved perfectly from the day he died).

The US Flag looked odd.

It took a second before I realized that…it looked odd with 48 stars.

I think every grade-school kid knows that all the stars on the US flag each stand for a US state. But what I don’t think people realize (since it’s been nearly 70 years without a new State), is that the US flag changed pretty regularly over time.

What was once totally normal is now just forgotten. We assume that the flag has always been that way now that two generations have grown up and lived with the same flag.

But it’s not just the flag that used to change frequently…it’s also the House of Representatives.

Every Presidential election, we get told that there are 535 electoral votes because the House has 435 Representatives and the Senate has 100 Senators.

But what we don’t get reminded about is that, like the flag, the number of Representatives in the House is not fixed.

In fact, like adding stars to the flag, it used to be totally normal to change the size of the House of Representatives based on both the number of states and the population of the United States.

It was totally normal, until we just sort of stopped. Specifically, we stopped with Reapportionment Act of 1929.

And since 1929, the population has kept growing. And we’ve even added two whole states.

The average size of a congressional district has more than tripled in size—from 210,328 inhabitants based on the 1910 Census, to 761,169 according to the 2020 Census.

And! The states have been growing at different rates. So since you can’t have less than 1 Representative, several States like Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska, etc have a single Representative that represents far fewer people than my Representative and even far fewer than any Rep in Texas or California.

This situation not only makes citizens of small States more powerful, it also messes up the Electoral College. It enables even more gerrymandering than every existed. And it forces Representatives into channeling the opinions of wayyyyy too many people.

And lastly, it makes it to where there are literally too few people to do the work of the House.There are 2,600 committees filled by…435 people who simply cannot be experts in every area of governance. And, since they serve massive districts, are increasingly likely to just turn over their nuanced opinions to special interests and informed lobbyists.

The Solution

Expand the House of Representatives.

The most elegant solution is the “smallest State solution” – aka, Wyoming gets one Rep. Divide the population by Wyoming’s to get the size of the House…then apportion.

Every Census, we’d update the total number and then apportion based on size and change.

But it also doesn’t have to be that small either. There’s no reason why we can’t have 4000 Representatives. Give Wyoming 10, and then apportion.

A constitutional amendment would be ideal, but a regular law would work.

Read more at Thirty-Thousand.org