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Comment by exegete | Hacker News Reader

Is it time to expand the House? It feels like as the population grows we shouldn’t dilute and move around representation.

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Personally, I say yes. The US is a huge outlier among OECD nations [1] and this definitely shows in the connection and level of interaction people feel to their representatives, at least based on my experience living in both the US and a country with a far lower ratio.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representatio...

It's not such an easy decision. Sure if you have more reps, each constituent arguably has more access. The flip side is that they have more access to a less powerful rep. If you had 10,000 people in congress, sure it'd be a lot easier to get in touch with one of them, but 1 person in a group of 10,000 doesn't have much influence, so how much is that interaction really worth?

Even at 435, unless your rep is a senior member with some important committee assignments and they happen to be in the majority party, getting the ear of your rep isn't worth all that much.

Getting the ear of your rep could lead to your rep getting the ear of other reps, or the scruff of some federal agency.

The real solution being to devolve more power to state legislatures with on-the-ground familiarity with local issues, since it's actually quite easy to get the ear of your _state_ representative.

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I think this exactly right. However, in the U.S. we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for decades, centralizing power more and more at the federal level. This is, in part anyway, what has turned federal elections into such a bloodsport. If your side loses, people who don't share your values or understand anything about where you live suddenly have a big say in a lot of things that affect you directly. This is true regardless of your particular political affiliation.

The power of reps extends far beyond just passing legislation, and even then, essentially all of them are on some committees. Lots of them (maybe even most/all?) make themselves accessible to constituents to help work through government bureaucracy, and a representative shining a light on a constituent's issue can help things get addressed. I'm not sure jumping straight to 10,000 reps would necessarily be the best idea, but I think having been static for the past 100 years isn't ideal either.

Power is bad.

> so how much is that interaction really worth?

Wait, you mean more reps results in less value in buying them? Sign me up for that plan!

Bottom line: More, and less powerful, reps means more diverse representation, and less power to abuse. Win-win.

A better plan would be to change to a proportional system in the House, where seats are allocated to parties according to national vote totals. State lines are arbitrarily drawn and do not actually represent the actual divisions among Americans. The fact that a representative from a densely populated urban district represents more people than a representative from a sparsely populated rural state is inherently undemocratic (this is even worse in the Senate). We do not need more representatives, we need better representation.

This would violate one of the central promises of the union which was that the large populous areas would not be able to dictate to the smaller regions and would instead be forced to compromise with them. We seem poised to start expanding the union again in the coming decades. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to get smaller Mexican states or central American countries to agree to join the union if they believed they would have no say in running their local after doing so.

I understand where you are coming from as the US is so homogenous now thanks to 250 years of interstate population movement that the delineations seem arbitrary and unfair, but they were very distinct separate regions once upon a time and looking forward the regions we hope to bring into our union are more different than the average American than similar so these same protections will be critical to the effort.

That is the unconvincing argument for the (extremely) undemocratic Senate. The House is supposed to reflect the will of the people which is why we apportion representatives according to the states' populations; the only compromise was that no state would receive less than one representative.

Really though, appealing the logic used 250 years ago is not very convincing. We have different concerns today than we did in in the 18th century. We are not trying to convince a ragtag group of states to form a union, the union has formed and is unlikely to disintegrate. Today we have a problem of bad representation in Congress, and it has been getting worse and worse with each passing year. It is not just about state borders, it is also a problem of how districts are drawn within states, and a proportional system would address that as well (why should we ever talk about gerrymandering? it is an artificial problem that can easily be solved). Year after year a majority of Americans have watched as people the party they voted against somehow took power, kept power, and received just enough power to prevent widely supported initiatives from going anywhere. The trend has been getting worse and worse as Republicans from sparsely populated states have become more and more aggressive at pressing their structural advantage. That needs to be addressed before people start questioning the value of democracy itself.

This is a terrible idea and let me tell you why.

First, it puts the balance in the house in the hands of the campaign managers for president (or whichever "vote totals" you would prefer to go by) second, it entrenches the 2 party system as a de jure institution. Third, while districts are drawn very much arbitrarily (and in many cases against the interests of the people in them a la gerrymandering) people do have more in common with neighbors than simple party members from the other side of the country. A republican and a democrat in the 6th district have more in common than two republicans, one from Maine and one from Louisiana. Your proposal eliminates representation of community interests and elevates party interest above all else. It also severely damages the check the house can have on the president since whichever party wins the presidency also wins the house.

A better solution is this solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am... thankfully it has already been passed by congress and is awaiting state ratification. It would ensure that each representative represents the same number of people but it would still preserve community interest representation and probably strengthen it and make party interest an afterthought in the house.

One issue with increasing the number of representatives is that you make each individual member less powerful, and consequently centralize power in the parties (and the executive).

Unlike the senate where all the power rests in Joe Manchins hands

In a senate that's split 50-50, Joe Manchin has exactly as much power as every other Senator. Right now he's just the only one willing to use it.

The Senate is so different from the house that I don't think it is worth it to make a comparison. Much better to compare to other legislatures for large population nation states, like Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Australia, and Nigeria.

I don't think I agree with this. Suppose there were 1 million representatives, each with ~330 constituents. This is untenable, sure, but imagine this were the case. Would a body like that even be capable of having votes on party lines? Would a body like that even be capable of operating as a two party system?

Then, the academic cases, wouldn't a body like that make it more likely to have other parties have a larger role in national politics?

I'd say since the house is supposed to be a democratic institution, the only one in the federal government, making individual members less powerful is a good thing. If the body is supposed to represent the population directly, the less powerful each individual is in the body the less oligarchic that body will be.

Yes, and it's time to solve that problem once and for all with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...

Interestingly this amendment was passed by congress with the bill of rights with no expiration and is still waiting before the States for ratification. So it does not require Congress to act, only many of the states. Another amendment passed with the bill of rights was ratified in 1992.

It would guarantee that all congressional seats on congress represent an equal number of people, thus making the house of representatives a truly democratic institution. It would make house representation a more local enterprise and reduce the effectiveness of gerrymandering. The downsides are of course that there would be thousands of representatives and the capitol would then need to be rebuilt or some other mechanism created for house and joint sessions.

Your link says there would be >6000 reps. That's nothing. Just build a very small stadium, with "Yes" and "No" buttons wired to every seat.

Wouldn't adding incremental representatives to the house "dilute" representation regardless? I would argue that this isn't a dilution of anyone's representation, it's a re-weighting of representatives to a more representative distribution based on underlying demographic movement over the last 10 years.

The number of representatives makes it hard to fairly apportion the seats. Montana went from 1 representative for 1M people to 2 for 1M, meaning each should represent about 500k people. Meanwhile in my district in NJ over 700k people are represented by one person. It was unfair before, when Montanans had too few representatives, and it is just as unfair now, when they have too many (compared to NJ). More representatives would improve the granularity and make the system (somewhat) fairer.

If improving granularity is the goal, wouldn’t it make even more sense to have fractional votes? After all, there’s no real reason why each representative’s vote should count equally...

It's sort of nice to be able to reason about votes in a straightforward way, and you'd have even worse social dynamics if some members are literally more powerful inside the chamber than others.

If you can convince 27 more states to ratify the congressional apportionment amendment you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...

To be clear, one does not need an amendment to increase the size of the House.

Changing the size of the House can be done through normal legislation after a Census.

Yeah, but it's extremely unlikely to happen that way

In particular, such legislation would have to pass the House. Each representative in the House can decide: "Do I want to be one of 435 representatives, and represent a significant number of people, or do I want to be one of some larger number of representatives, and have correspondingly less power, both in DC and at home?" Given that calculus, I'd be surprised if the House passed any such thing.

Anti-democratic principles and minority rule are baked into the constitution. Plus, with one party actively benefiting from it, it's not going to happen any time soon. But yes, expanding the house would be the right thing to do.

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