I think that it’s far past time to increase the number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives to reflect and represent the U.S. population more fairly that it currently does and to put the concepts of "one person one vote" and "equal protection" more fully into practice.
Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, who also works with Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, wrote an
article in 2014 indicating that Trende believes that it's time to increase the number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives. Also in 2014, Brian Frederick, Political Science Chair at Bridgewater State, wrote a similar
article which cites the "cube root law" for determining the number of members in a lower house of a national legislature. Given the current U.S. population of just over 324 million, the ”cube root law” would indicate that there should be about 687 representatives in the House, which is about a 58 percent increase over the current House membership of 435.
From 1790, when there was an average of about 58,000 citizens per representative, up through 1913, when there was an average of about 234,000 citizens per representative, the number of members of the House was increased after every census. However, the
Apportionment Act of 1911 fixed the number seats in the House of Representatives at 435. Then the
Reapportionment Act of 1929 established a method for apportioning those 435 House seats among the states. Given that the number of House seats has been limited to 435 for over a hundred years while the U.S. population has more than tripled over that time, the average number of citizens now represented by a House member is over 740,000. Since the number of representatives was limited by law rather than being limited by the Constitution, a new law, rather than a Constitutional Amendment, is all that is required to increase the number of seats in the House.
However, given the current makeup of the Congress and the current occupant of the White House I don't think that a new law increasing the number of members in House will be enacted in the next few years. The membership of the House won’t likely be increased until after the Democrats regain control both houses of Congress and the presidency. So, it’s a longer term goal for which the proper groundwork needs to start to be laid now so it won’t be such a heavy lift to get an appropriate law passed when the political environment becomes favorable to passing such a law, which should, in theory, help make the House less dysfunctional than it currently is.
The concept needs to begin to be raised now with candidates and placed in platforms and discussed on blogs in order to get eventually aired in mainstream political discussions and venues to help grease the tracks to enable the concept to become a reality.
Increasing the number of members in the House has several benefits as it will not only make the House more small “d” democratic and representative of the population at large by reducing the relative over representation of rural areas and increasing the representation of metropolitan areas which are relatively under represented, it will make gerrymandering districts more difficult since the fewer people per district, the harder the districts become to gerrymander by “packing” and “cracking,” and it will even make the the electoral college, as archaic as it as, more representative of the population as well, since the number of votes in electoral college is based on the number of House and Senate seats.