Why are there 438 representatives

The second matter was settled first, when, in June , the three-fifths rule was agreed to. These amendments were the most important issues in his campaign for Congress against James Monroe, his opponent then and, 28 years later, his successor to the presidency. He defeated Monroe 1, to Yes, the districts where much smaller then. Lesson learned, Congressman Madison went to New York as member of the First Congress and authored a series of amendments now known as the Bill of Rights.

His proposed First Amendment was a guarantee that the House would begin with a defined number of members—which was not included in the Constitution—and would grow according to a specific formula laid out in the amendment. It fell short of ratification by one state. Had it been ratified, the freedoms we now enjoy as part of the First Amendment, including speech and the press, would have been the Second Amendment. For the next years, from , membership in the House of Representatives grew as the population increased and as new states were admitted to the Union—with the exception of , when the Congress reduced the size of the House membership.

The Reapportionment Act of increased House membership from to and allowed a new member each from the Arizona and the New Mexico territories when they joined the Union. In , Fenway Park opened, the Titanic sank, and the House had members. Fenway Park has changed, ocean liners are ancient history—but the House still has the same number of representatives today as it did then, even as the population has more than tripled—from 92 million to million.

After the Census determined that more Americans lived in cities than in the rural areas, a nativist Congress with a racist Southern core faced its decennial responsibility of reapportioning a country that had experienced a large growth in immigrants.

The population had grown in ten years by 15 percent, to million. Recent immigrants lived in vibrant enclaves with their fellow countrymen. They spoke their mother tongues, shopped at ethnic stores and markets, partied at ethnic clubs, and attended ethnic plays and movies.

Earlier anti-inclusion acts had already restricted immigration from Asia. Harvey, general counsel of the Colored Council of Washington, who detailed the systematic discrimination against black voting. We have a white primary, which has nothing to do with the general election.

The n——— does not participate in the white primary. Eagles put it. Meanwhile, as Congress debated how to reapportion the country, women got the right to vote, and alcohol was banned. Mitchell Palmer, who feared the spread of Soviet-style Communism. By , the Ku Klux Klan had 4 million members. The Klan was organized, lethal, and rapidly expanding to the West and Midwest. In the South, the Klan was Democratic, in the West and Midwest it was Republican, and everywhere its members saw a country where white Protestants were losing power and immigrants were ascendant.

Keeping the number at ensured that Congress would not recognize the changes brought about by the African-American migration and the immigrant population growth in the Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities.

The South and rural America, which dominated the House, rejoiced. At the last minute, the Republican authors of the bill removed a decades-long requirement that districts be compact, contiguous, and of equal population.

The states were now free to draw districts of varying sizes and shapes, or to elect their representatives at large. At-large representation had actually existed before, at the beginning of the republic, but was made illegal over the course of the nineteenth century. No one would have imagined that the racist, anti-urban, arbitrary number of would last, unchanged, for years. Certainly not the Framers of the Constitution, who believed that the House should grow with each decennial Census.

Communication with constituents today is more and more electronic than personal. Some members still do in-person town halls, though social media makes organizing to disrupt them easy.

As the districts grow in size, the likelihood of having personal contact with House members diminishes. During my 18 years in Congress, the thousands of unscripted, often poignant, crazy, and contentious moments with my constituents shaped me and gave them a chance to take my measure.

Today, members and their constituents can instantaneously communicate with each other, but a digital presence is no substitute for the real thing. It is like watching Fourth of July fireworks on your iPhone. So what to do? I propose we do what the Founding Fathers thought made sense: Increase the size of the House of Representatives as the population grows so that it can become representative of the people once again. I once raised the idea of increasing the size of the House with a prominent member.

But what if the argument is not just about more members, but rather smaller and more representative districts and greater citizen access to their members? And what if the result is a more diverse group of representatives and even, possibly, a reduction in the polarization that paralyzes Congress today? The first question is, what is the correct size of an expanded House? A strong mathematical case can be made for either equal proportions or major fractions.

Deciding between them is a policy matter based on whether minimizing the differences in district sizes in absolute terms through major fractions or proportional terms through equal proportions is most preferred by Congress.

Then a state's population is divided by the ideal size to determine the number of Representatives to be allocated to that state. One of the fundamental issues before the framers at the Constitutional Convention in was the allocation of representation in Congress between the smaller and larger states. The Constitution provided the first apportionment of House seats: 65 Representatives were allocated among the states based on the framers' estimates of how seats might be apportioned following a census.

Amendment XIV, section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers Article 1, section 2.

The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative From its beginning in , Congress was faced with questions about how to apportion the House of Representatives—questions that the Constitution did not answer. How populous should a congressional district be on average? Moreover, no matter how one specified the ideal population of a congressional district or the number of Representatives in the House, a state's ideal apportionment would, as a practical matter, always be either a fraction, or a whole number and a fraction—say, Thus, another question was whether that state would be apportioned 14 or 15 representatives?

Consequently, these two major issues dominated the apportionment debate: how populous a congressional district ought to be later re-cast as how large the House ought to be , and how to treat fractional entitlements to Representatives.

The questions of how populous a congressional district should be and how many Representatives should constitute the House have received little attention since the number of Representatives was last increased from to after the Census. Various methods were considered and some were tried, each raising questions of fundamental fairness.

The issue of fairness could not be perfectly resolved: inevitable fractional entitlements and the requirement that each state have at least one representative lead to inevitable disparities among the states' average congressional district populations. Congress, which sought an apportionment method that would minimize those disparities, continued this debate until , when it enacted the "equal proportions" method—the apportionment method still in use today for a full explanation of this method, see below.

The process of apportioning seats in the House is constrained both constitutionally and statutorily. As noted previously, the Constitution defines both the maximum and minimum size of the House.

There can be no fewer than one Representative per state, and no more than one for every 30, persons. The Apportionment Act of , in addition to specifying the apportionment method, sets the House size at , requires an apportionment every 10 years, and mandates administrative procedures for apportionment.

The President is required to transmit to Congress "a statement showing the whole number of persons in each state" and the resulting seat allocation within one week after the opening of the first regular session of Congress following the census.

The Census Bureau has been assigned the responsibility of computing the apportionment. As a matter of practice, the Director of the Bureau reports the results of the apportionment at the end of December of the census year.

Once received by Congress, the Clerk of the House of Representatives is charged with the duty of sending to the governor of each state a "certificate of the number of Representatives to which such state is entitled" within 15 days of receiving notice from the President. An intuitive way to apportion the House is through simple rounding a method never adopted by Congress. First, the U.

Then, each state's population is divided by the "ideal" district population. In most cases this will result in a whole number and a fractional remainder, as noted earlier. Each state will definitely receive seats equal to the whole number, and the fractional remainders will either be rounded up or down at the. There are two fundamental problems with using simple rounding for apportionment, given a House of fixed size. First, it is possible that some state populations might be so small that they would be "entitled" to less than half a seat.

Yet, the Constitution requires that every state must have at least one seat in the House. Thus, a method that relies entirely on rounding will not comply with the Constitution if there are states with very small populations. Second, even a method that assigns each state its constitutional minimum of one seat, and otherwise relies on rounding at the.

Thus, this intuitive way to apportion fails because, by definition, it does not take into account the constitutional requirement that every state have at least one seat in the House and the statutory requirement that the House size be fixed at The current apportionment method the method of equal proportions established by the act satisfies the constitutional and statutory requirements.

Although an equal proportions apportionment is not normally computed in the theoretical way described below, the method can be understood as a modification of the rounding scheme described above. First, the "ideal" sized district is found by dividing the apportionment population by to serve as a "trial" divisor. Then each state's apportionment population is divided by the "ideal" district size to determine its number of seats. Rather than rounding up any remainder of.

A geometric mean of two numbers is the square root of the product of the two numbers. For example, for the apportionment, the "ideal" size district of , had to be adjusted upward to between , and , 11 to produce a member House.

Because the divisor is adjusted so that the total number of seats will equal , the problem of the "floating" House size is solved. The constitutional requirement of at least one seat for each state is met by assigning each state one seat automatically regardless of its population size. Although the process of determining an apportionment through a series of trials using divisions near the "ideal" sized district as described above works, it is inefficient because it requires a series of calculations using different divisors until the total is reached.

Accordingly, the Census Bureau determines apportionment by computing a "priority" list of state claims to each seat in the House. During the early 20 th century, Walter F. Willcox, a Cornell University mathematician, determined that if the rounding points used in an apportionment method are divided into each state's population the mathematical equivalent of multiplying the population by the reciprocal of the rounding point , the resulting numbers can be ranked in a priority list for assigning seats in the House.

Such a priority list does not assume a fixed House size because it ranks each of the states' claims to seats in the House so that any size House can be chosen easily without the necessity of extensive re-computations. The traditional method of constructing a priority list to apportion seats by the equal proportions method involves first computing the reciprocals 14 of the geometric means the "rounding points" between every pair of consecutive whole numbers representing the seats to be apportioned.

It is then possible to multiply by decimals rather than divide by fractions the former being a considerably easier task. For example, the reciprocal of the geometric mean between 1 and 2 1. These reciprocals for all pairs 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, etc. In order to construct the "priority list," each state's apportionment population is multiplied by each of the multipliers. The resulting products are ranked in order to show each state's claim to seats in the House.

For example, see Table 2 , below assume that there are three states in the Union California, New York, and Florida and that the House size is set at 30 Representatives. The first seat for each state is assigned by the Constitution; so the remaining 27 seats must be apportioned using the equal proportions formula. The apportionment populations for these states were 37,, for California, 19,, for New York, and 18,, for Florida.

Once the priority values are computed, they are ranked with the highest value first. The resulting ranking is numbered and seats are assigned until the total is reached. By using the priority rankings instead of the rounding procedures described earlier in this paper under " The Formula in Theory ," it is possible to see how an increase or decrease in the House size will affect the allocation of seats without the necessity of additional calculations.

Table 1. Multiplier a. More specifically, for this example in Table 2 , the computed priority values column six for each of the three states are ordered from largest to smallest. By constitutional provision, seats one to three are given to each state.

The next determination is the fourth seat in the hypothesized chamber. California's claim to a second seat, based on its priority value, is 26,, Based on the priority values, California has the highest claim for its second seat and is allocated the fourth seat in the hypothesized chamber.

Table 2. Notes: The Constitution requires that each state have at least one seat. Consequently, the first three seats assigned are not included in the table. Table prepared by CRS. Next, the fifth seat's allocation is determined. California's claim to a third seat, based on the computed priority value, is 15,, Again, California has a higher priority value, and is allocated its third seat, the fifth seat in the hypothesized chamber.

Next the sixth seat's allocation is determined in the same fashion. California's claim to a fourth seat, based on the computed priority value, is 10,, As New York's priority value is higher than either California's or Florida's, it is allocated its second seat, the sixth seat in the hypothesized chamber. Next, the seventh seat's allocation is determined.

Again, California's claim to a fourth seat, based on the computed priority value, is 10,, As Florida's priority value is higher than either of the other states, Florida is, finally, allocated its second seat, the seventh seat in the hypothesized chamber. This same process is continued until all 30 seats in this hypothesized House are allocated to the three states. From Table 2 , then, we see that if the United States were made up of three states and the House size were to be set at 30 members, California would have 11 seats, New York would have 10, and Florida would have 9.

Any other size House can be determined by picking points in the priority list and observing what the maximum size state delegation would be for each state. A priority listing for all 50 states based on the Census is in the Appendix to this report.

It shows priority rankings for the assignment of seats in a House ranging in size from 51 to seats. The equal proportions rule of rounding at the geometric mean results in differing rounding points, depending on which numbers are chosen.

For example, the geometric mean between 1 and 2 is 1. Table 3 , below, shows the "rounding points" for assignments to the House using the equal proportions method for a state delegation size of up to The rounding points are listed between each delegation size because they are the thresholds that must be passed in order for a state to be entitled to another seat.

The table illustrates that, as the delegation size of a state increases, larger fractions are necessary to entitle the state to additional seats. The fact that higher rounding points are necessary for states to obtain additional seats has led to charges that the equal proportions formula favors small states at the expense of large states. In Fair Representation , a study of congressional apportionment, authors M.

Balinski and H. Young concluded that if "the intent is to eliminate any systematic advantage to either the small or the large, then only one method, first proposed by Daniel Webster in , will do.

The NAS concluded that "the method of equal proportions is preferred by the committee because it satisfies Table 3. Notes: Any number between , and , divided into each state's population will produce a House size of if rounded at these points, which are the geometric means of each pair of successive numbers.

A bill that would have changed the apportionment method to another formula called the "Hamilton-Vinton" method was introduced in After the U. Iceland had the lowest ratio: one member of the Althing for every 5, or so Icelanders. While much of the cross-national disparity in representation ratios can be explained by the big population of the U.

Even if Congress decided to expand the size of the House, the large U. If the House were to grow as large as the Bundestag, for instance, the ratio would fall only to one representative per , people. In order to reduce the ratio to where it was after the census, the House would need to have 1, members.

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