Posted on 06/26/2026 11:04:35 AM PDT by CathyWhite
In Part 1 (link below), I argued that the House of Representatives was designed to grow.
For most of American history, it did.
Then, in 1929, Congress froze the House at 435 seats.
It has remained there ever since.
Part 2 asks a different question: If the House is supposed to grow, how large should it be?
At first, I thought the answer might have something to do with human nature. Maybe there was something buried deep in our DNA — some limit on how many people we can know, trust, manage, or represent.
I was wrong.
The deeper I dug, the more one name kept appearing.
Rein Taagepera.
Taagepera trained as a physicist before turning to political science. He approached representative government the way physicists approach any complex system: by looking for patterns that emerge as it grows.
He discovered a surprisingly simple relationship: representative assemblies tend to approximate the cube root of the population they represent.
I understood the pattern. But I still didn't understand why.
So I emailed him, and to my surprise, the 93-year-old Taagepera wrote back.
"At first, I took this approach to be so evident that I did not bother explaining it," he wrote. "But when I did, I found that the concept still did not enter the heads of all too many political scientists."
Imagine a cube. Double the length of its sides and its volume increases eightfold. Triple it and the volume increases twenty-sevenfold. Growth is not linear — as systems become larger, the relationships between their parts change.
The cube root rule is about scale. Taagepera explained it this way:
"The gist is that we aim at minimizing the number of communication channels for one representative. Too few representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the constituency. Too many representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the assembly."
Representative democracies face two competing pressures: communication between citizens and representatives, and communication within the legislature itself. If a legislature is too large, the institution becomes difficult to coordinate; if it's too small, districts become enormous and representation grows distant. The United States — 435 representatives for 340 million people — sits firmly in the second category, and the cube root relationship appears to describe where the real balance point lies.
The Framers of the Constitution didn't know the cube root rule, but they understood the underlying problem. Article I, Section 2 caps representation at one member for every 30,000 people — a ceiling, not a mandate. The Framers weren't insisting the House maintain that exact ratio forever; they were expressing a broader principle: representation should expand as the population does.
Taagepera's research suggests that large democracies tend to settle into roughly the same balance point as they grow. For the United States today, the cube root of roughly 340 million Americans is about 700.
Not 435.
Not 11,000.
About 700.
For many people, the immediate reaction is understandable: "The last thing we need is more members of Congress."
But expanding the House does not increase the power of politicians. It dilutes it. Power becomes less concentrated.
A larger House reduces the ability of small groups and individual members to hold the system hostage simply because margins are razor thin. Political influence becomes distributed across more representatives and more communities. Smaller districts also lower the barrier to entry for new political movements. Independent candidates and third parties gain a more realistic path to winning seats. The power of the duoparty diminishes.
Engineers run into a version of this same scaling problem. As a bridge or a building grows larger, its weight increases by the cube of its size — but the strength of its supporting beams only increases by the square. Scale it up far enough while keeping the old proportions, and the structure fails under its own weight. The fix isn't to shrink the building back down. It's to redesign it — thicker columns, redistributed load, a structural logic built for the new scale.
The U.S. House of Representatives suffers the same problem. It's still shaped for a country of a few million. It was never resized for a country of 340 million.
Today, the average House member represents roughly 780,000 Americans, with some districts over a million. A 700-member House would reduce the average to roughly 500,000. Representatives would serve smaller communities, spend less time and money across enormous districts, and be more accessible and accountable to the voters who elect them.
When I started down this rabbit hole, I was looking for a number. What I found was an explanation.
The Constitution supplied the principle.
Rein Taagepera supplied the math.
A century ago, Congress stopped growing the House.
Maybe it's time to start again.
-----
Part 1 (https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5796470-the-us-house-was-designed-to-grow-lets-expand-it/)
That is a point I like to make with libtards who are still butthurt about the 2000 election, as Algore would have won the presidency if he had won his home state, like any decent presidential candidate should.
Post #60 touches tangentially on a Convention of the States.
There are 650 members of the UK House of Commons; just for reference.
If this was in the article, I didn’t see it.
Increasing the number of seats in the House would also eliminate the need to gerrymander. Basically doubling the number of seats in Congress to 900 (But cutting the salary and staffing allowances in 1/2. So revenue neutral) would mean that many minority areas would have their favorite skin color representative.
But I don't think the larger population problem is really the root cause.
There two primary causes: 1) the disproportionate increase in poor non-whites whose votes are for sale (or whose ballots are freely stuffed thanks to "motor voter"), including illegals. They are ignorant of both political liberty and the bourgeois habits that support it, or actively hostile to both. 2) the homogenization of the elite by leftist educational indoctrination, which makes the maintenance of anti-American political opinion a status marker for being a member of our credentialed but ignorant elites. AOC is a perfect example of the latter.
It's difficult to fix both problems, especially simultaneously, as it requires a wholesale shutdown of immigration and reindustrialization of the economy with a labor shortage to give more of the lumpen proletariat a stake in the system and a reformation of the leftist educational-industrial complex.
This got me wondering: Could states apply for an Article V convention on the single subject of House reapportionment?
I think they could. Article V doesn’t dictate the subject matter of proposed amendments. States could draft applications calling for a convention limited to something like:
“An amendment requiring the House of Representatives to expand automatically in proportion to population.”
Or they might specify a formula, such as:
one Representative per 100,000 people,
one per 500,000, or even a constitutional version of the cube root rule.
That would avoid asking Congress to voluntarily dilute its own power.
One caution though - there is a longstanding debate over whether an Article V convention can truly be limited to a single topic. Many scholars believe it can because the state applications define the subject. Others argue that once a convention is assembled, it may have broader authority, pointing to the 1787 convention, which exceeded its original mandate under the Articles of Confederation.
Because no Article V convention has ever been held, there is no definitive Supreme Court ruling resolving that dispute.
Yes excellent!
FYI - from Part 1:
Germany’s Bundestag has more than 700 members. The United Kingdom’s House of Commons has 650. France’s National Assembly has 577. Different systems, different histories, but similar proportional scale.
The United States is the outlier. Despite having one of the world’s largest democratic populations, the House has remained fixed at 435 members since 1929. The consequence is simple: districts are huge. Representation is stretched. And the lower chamber—the one designed to be closest to the people—operates at a scale that many peer democracies do not tolerate for long.
Other democracies handle the same pressure in different ways, but with the same design principle: representative institutions are expected to adjust. Some constitutions bake in regular readjustment after a census. Some tie the size of one chamber to another through a structural formula. Some set a constitutional range and require a statutory method for determining the exact number. Others leave the number to ordinary law so it can evolve. The mechanisms vary; the principle is consistent. Representation is not supposed to fossilize.
Ain’t seing that, but do see the personnel, staff, pay and benefits would be out of control with a House @ 700 members/
“ cutting the salary and staffing allowances in 1/2. So revenue neutral”
LOLOLOL! Come on, Fai! You know how government works!
Wouldn’t that put each state at the mercy of it’s large cities? They could just run 12 democrats for the twelve at-large seats and sweep the whole state with urban overwhelming, just like in presidential elections.
Absolutely.
Unfortunately I think this would encourage straight-ticket party-line voting, because after all, who has time to review the qualifications and positions of 20, 30 or 40 representatives running for office.
Another amendment along with term limits to help mend our broken congress:
Introduction
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to restrict campaign contributions for candidates to eligible voters.
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States:
Proposed Amendment - Campaign Contributions Limited to Eligible Voters
Section 1. Only natural persons who are eligible to vote for a candidate may contribute money or anything of value to that candidate’s campaign.
Section 2. No organization, association, corporation, or other entity shall make, fund, direct, or facilitate contributions to any candidate’s campaign.
Section 3. No person shall make a contribution to any candidate’s campaign on behalf of, or using funds provided by, any individual or entity not eligible to contribute under this article.
Section 4. Congress and the States shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Statement of Intent
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that electoral influence over candidates for public office is limited to those who are entitled to vote for them. By tying campaign contributions directly to voter eligibility, this amendment strengthens representative democracy, reduces external and institutional influence over elections, and preserves the principle that elected officials should be accountable only to their constituents.
But you still only get to vote for one candidate. If California has 52 seats in the House, there are going to be a lot of minor party down-ticket candidates who can make it to Washington.
See Post #35. I’m not recommending 12 separate elections for those 12 seats, but ONE election where the top 12 contenders are the winners.
Awesome
Democrats vote in lock step it is a rare Democrat that bucks the party.
May the incumbents say why they should receive the same pay for 1/2 the work? The staff wouldn’t lose jobs; they’d work for someone else.
Your fallacy is 1/2 the work. Government expands, never contracts. There’s no way we’d be able to reduce it that way. Double the headcount, double the staff, double the cost.
bmk
I have never lost a minute of sleep over anything posted on FR, but when I am wrong, it really hurts because it is so rare.
Therefore, I am forced to apologize:)
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