I think there's a powerful solution to a lot a what's been going wrong in the U.S. The House of Representatives is not representative enough. And the fix is very simple.
The original way that the size of the House of Representatives was spelled out in the Constitution as being determined by population and "shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand."
That changed in 1911 when the size of the House was fixed and the House has become less representative ever since.
Here's the deal. There's nothing that would prevent the Congress from voting to increase the size of the House of Representatives. There would be no other changes required to get this to happen. No changes to the Constitution are required.
What are the benefits?
First of all, directly, the House becomes more representative. Larger population states are going to have more power in the House. There would be a higher chance for me to have Democratic Representative in my district. More members make for more diversity and are going to be harder to buy off.
Secondly, since the Electoral College is made up of the number of Senators plus the number of Representatives for each state, it also becomes more representative of the real differences in state population and power.
The small states already have huge power in the Senate and the original concept was that the House would balance that out. It might have worked had we followed the original plan. The size of the house has been frozen for too long.
Here's an example for the math geeks:
Let's say that we triple the size of the house. I think the current number of people per representatives is about 700,000. That gives me a calculated population of around 320 million for 453 congresspeople.
Tripling the size of house would result in 1359 representatives and 233,333 people per Representative. Colorado, where I live would have nineteen representative instead of the current seven (little math inconsistencies are creeping in).
Wyoming, our neighbor to the north, would gain a representative and would have two.
This reflects the ten to one advantage that Colorado has over Wyoming. Currently the relative strength is seven to one.
In the Electoral College things change from Colorado's current advantage of nine to three with the current setup to a new setup of twenty one to four.
This would clearly change the presidential election system, especially if combined with some method of apportioning the states' votes, on a state-by-state basis. Again, the idea here is to not require any changes to the Constitution and to come up with something that could help right away.
If the size of the House were merely doubled, the effects would be less striking. This isn't that radical: the state of New Hampshire has a legislature size that is nearly as big as the U.S. House of Representatives!