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.
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Part 1 (https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5796470-the-us-house-was-designed-to-grow-lets-expand-it/)
One effect would be that candidates would need to run primarily on their positions rather than just slamming their district opponent. That's a positive thing, but it may also contribute to outlier candidates taking on radical positions in order to gain newsworthy attention from a select group of voters sufficient to get them across the finish line.
Another question to consider is how many would be allowed to run? Or would this be a potentially massive jungle primary?
Yes, the people who knew Gore best did not want him for President.
The last Tennessee resident to win Tennessee in the Presidential election was Andrew Jackson in 1832. James K. Polk lost Tennessee in 1844.
Three Presidents called Tennessee home but none were born in the state (Andrew Johnson was the third). Gore also was not born in Tennessee.
I’m from TN. Glad to have been able to vote against Gore.
Isn't it already this way?
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