435 is such an odd number (of course, it was briefly 437 from 1959-1963 when AK & HI were added, each then having 1 House member, with Inouye unimaginably still serving 53 years later). I don’t necessarily see a problem with increasing it to 501 seats (keeping an odd number to avoid a possible tie). That would assure a majority of states would get at least 1 additional member.
I think at least 1 FReeper or more have suggested increasing the membership to 1,000 or even 10,000. While 1,000 phased in over some time might be feasible, 10,000 would be too unwieldy and impossible to keep track of. If we adhered to the 30,000 per member requirement specified in the Constitution, we would have almost 10,500 members. California alone would have nearly 1,300 members (a nightmarish scenario). It would be like the NH House applied nationwide.
The Constitution set 30,000 persons as a minimum per CD, not as the ideal forever. I think that if we are to look at the original composition of the House and Senate for guidance a more instructive lesson can be drawn from the ratio of senators to representatives, which has an effect on the relative weight given to large states in the Electoral College, since each state gets the same number of EVs as the sum of its senators and representatives. The First Congress was composed of 26 senators and 65 representatives, a ratio of 2.5 representatives per senator. The ratio currently is 4.35 representatives, meaning that each large state has a heavier weight in the Electoral College than was the case originally (and, one could argue, was intended by the Framers: the 2 “freebie EVs” given to each state were 28.57% of possible EVs originally and only 18.96% today. I would amend the Constitution to increase the number of senators to 3 per state (which would have the added benefit of giving every state the opportunity to elect a senator (and thus affect control of the Senate) in every biennial election, so you don’t, say, shut out Virginians from U.S. Senate elections in 2010) and set the total number of representatives at 3 times the number of members of the Senate (unless that would yield an even number, in which case it would be 1+ the product of 3 times the number of senators), which with 50 states would give us 150 senators and 451 representatives.
Another benefit of such an amendment is that current states would not see their number of representatives drop in the Census following the admission of a new state; if a new state were admitted, the House wouldn’t revert to 435 members at the next Census, it would increase by 9 members. That could be very important going forward, since I think that we could see a lot of new states coming in, not just Puerto Rico and New Columbia (DC plus the DC suburbs in MD and VA), but also 4 new states being carved out of CA (I would split CA into 2 heavily Dem states (Bay Area and LA) and 3 GOP-leaning states), 3 new states carved out of TX (I would split TX into 4 GOP states) and 2 new states being carved out of FL (I would split FL into 1 heavily Dem state (Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroes Counties) and 2 GOP states). And if we could form the State of Chicaukee (Cook and Lake Counties in IL, Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha Counties in WI and Lake County in IN), or some other über-Democrat states that would leave the remaining states comfortably Republican, even better.