Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution states that "[t]he number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative." The argument for the 30,000 figure was made by James Madison in Federalist No. 56, who argued that figure as a reasonable compromise between a too-large constituency that would cause greater disconnect between the elected representative and the needs and wishes of the people of that constituency, and a too-large House of Representatives that would prove unwieldy and unable to work out its differences and complete its business.
Recognizing that the population of the fledgling republic would likely increase as time progressed, Madison noted that the number of Representatives would increase as population increased, and Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 established that a census would be taken every ten years starting in 1790 to determine (among other things, such as allocation of federal moneys collected through taxation) the number of Representatives to be encumbered by each state.
At the same time, the argument against a too-large House as population increased was addressed by the Founders in the first of the original twelve amendments (also drafted by Madison) to the Constitution that were to become the Bill of Rights. This proposed amendment, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, was to establish the automatic increase in the number of Representatives based on a formula that would eventually increase the size of the constituency from 30,000 to 50,000 residents. However, this amendment fell one state short of the required three-fourths for ratification, and to this day remains the only one of those original twelve amendments never to have been ratified. (The second of the original twelve, establishing that any federal statute increasing in the salaries of members of Congress cannot go into effect until the start of the next Congress after said statute, was ratified 203 years later in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, the most recent amendment to the Constitution as of today.)
Consequently, with no automatic constitutional mechanism in place to increase the number of Representatives commensurate with population growth, Congress has instead relied on Apportionment Acts the year after each census to determine the number of Representatives to be added to each state. And with no constitutional maximum on the number of residents per Representative (the 30,000 figure being a minimum rather than a maximum), the size of each congressional district increased steadily after each new census, passing 100,000 in less than a century. During the first century of its existence, the size of the House grew fivefold, from the original 65 Representatives allotted in 1790 to 332 in 1890. Much of this increase, of course, was due to the admission of an additional 31 states over that time, but more importantly, enumeration was increased by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which eliminated the racist three-fifths-of-a-person provision in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3.
After the 1910 census, with an official population of 92 million (a 50% increase over just the previous 20 years), 433 Representatives were allocated by the Apportionment Act of 1911 among the 46 states (Utah being admitted in 1896 and Oklahoma in 1907). With the subsequent admissions of sparsely-populated New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, the number was increased to 435.
Then, after the 1920 census, something interesting happened.
The 1920 elections gave the White House and both houses of Congress to the Republicans, with congressional districts still based on the 1911 Apportionment Act, since the reapportionment mandated in 1921 hadn't yet taken place. But the GOP, seeing the census numbers, knew it would lose its House majority if the projected increase in the size of the House (48 more Representatives) were allowed to take place.
So they did then what they do today. They obstructed. They refused to pass the mandated Apportionment Act when due in 1921. And they refused in 1922. And 1923. And 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, and 1928.
Then, in 1929 they realized they had a problem. They still hadn't acted on the 1920 census, and the next census was coming up in less than a year. Can't go down in history as the party that ignored a census for the first time in the nation's history, now, can we? By this time, urban districts had grown massive constituencies, one district with over a million residents. But Republican-friendly rural districts were staying at or below the national average size of a little over 200,000 residents. Not good optics for the home team.
So the GOP-controlled Congress finally crafted a solution. Okay, we'll do the reapportionment on two conditions: 1) that the Apportionment Act of 1929 include language fixing the size of the House at the nearly 20-year-outdated number of 435 for that and all future reapportionments; and 2) that states allocated more than one Representative be allowed to do something they were never allowed to do before, assign one or more Representatives (even all of them if they wished) as statewide at-large Representatives.
So now you had states losing Representatives even though their population increased, and you had states who had free rein to separate their Representatives even more from their constituencies by increasing their constituents' population whenever they wanted to. And in the process use that manipulation as a tool for gerrymandering.
Congress could have repealed both the 435 limit and at-large language in any subsequent post-census Apportionment Act if it wanted to. Problem is, in a majority-rule system that would require a majority vote. But the party with the majority, whether the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, never wanted to lose its majority, so it's hardly a surprise that that has never happened. The barn door had been opened, and the horse ran off a long time ago. We had a golden opportunity in 1959 after the admission of Alaska and Hawaii mandated the addition of two more Representatives. But two years later we took those two back by taking them from other states.
In Federalist No. 55 Madison wrote, "At the expiration of twenty-five years, according to the computed rate of increase, the number of representatives will amount to two hundred, and of fifty years, to four hundred. This is a number which, I presume, will put an end to all fears arising from the smallness of the body." But as we see above, the growth of the size of the House didn't pan out that way. Not even close. It was only a bit over 200 members after 50 years. And now, 230 years later, we're barely over that 400 projected by Madison in just 50 years. Today the average House constituency is over 700,000. And because of the requirement that each state have at least one Representative, there is great variance in that number from one state to another, from a little over half a million to nearly a million residents. Only a tiny fraction of that amount of variance would be possible today if we still went by the 30,000, or even the eventual 50,000 proposed under the Congressional Apportionment Amendment.
Okay. I'll be the first to admit that a 6000-seat House just might be a bit too big to manage. And the fact that voting rights have eventually been extended to, in theory at least, every American age 18 or older without a felony conviction means that, again in theory at least, each Representative is directly accountable to a significantly larger pool of eligible voters. (In practice, of course, is another thing, as we see in places like Georgia and Alabama. And felony disenfranchisement is a problem in most states. We still have a lot of work to do. That's your cue, Senate Democrats. You have HR 1/S 1 in front of you. You know what to do.)
So maybe we don't need to be stuck on 30,000, or 50,000. So what would be a reasonable number today?
There's been a lot of talk about something called the "Wyoming Rule," where House seats would be allotted to each state based on its population in multiples of the population of the least populous state. That would be - yep, you guessed it - Wyoming, with about 580,000 residents. That would give my state (California) 66 House seats instead of its current 53. And the total number of House seats would be about 547 - a relatively modest increase if you ask me. And it would still leave the possibility of one or more states losing House seats despite increases in population, if the least populous state's population grows faster. This is in fact what happened with Wyoming between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. Its 2000 population would have projected 569 seats nationwide.
We need only move one state east to find a better alternative, using multiples of the least populous House constituency, which is each of South Dakota's two House seats at just over 400,000 residents each. That would give California 98 seats, and the entire House 757 - a 75% increase. Now we're getting somewhere.
But if we just continued the formula used the last time we increased the size of the House over a century ago, we'd be looking at a House with nearly 1200 seats, each representing about a quarter of a million people.
Change is hard. We can naysay until the cows come home. Oh, no, more taxpayer dollars going toward congressional and staff salaries. Oh, no, more politicians we can't trust. Oh, no, there isn't enough room in the House chambers.
Puh-leeze.
I don't buy any of that. The salaries of House members and their staff will still be a tiny fraction of the federal budget. There's no rule that says that Congress must meet in the Capitol chambers - and given the COVID-19 pandemic and the vulnerability of the Capitol demonstrated by the events of 6 January, maybe it's time to consider a more secure location and/or ongoing limited use of remote technology. And the very reason we have politicians we can't trust is because their constituencies have become so huge that individual votes are so diluted and individual and even group voices are being drowned out. (Okay, there are a few other reasons, like voter disenfranchisement, virtually unlimited campaign contributions by wealthy special interests, and a lack of an adequate public financing to level the playing field. But those are separate battles we're already taking up.)
We have to start the conversation. The future of democracy in America may depend on it. There's really no question that our Congress isn't working anywhere near the way James Madison and the other Founders envisioned. (In some ways, of course, that may be a good thing, but this isn't one of those ways.) Finally ratifying the Twenty-Seventh Amendment after 200 years started with one college student. Sure, it's an old and maybe a little tired expression, but one person can make a difference.
In Federalist No. 55 Madison also wrote, "I am unable to conceive that the people of America, in their present temper, or under any circumstances which can speedily happen, will choose, and every second year repeat the choice of, sixty-five or a hundred men who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery." One has to wonder what his reaction would be if he saw the events of 6 January, the Representatives in Congress and President who encouraged and, evidence suggests, facilitated them, and saw the enthusiastic support those Representatives and now former President continue to receive.