The House of Representatives Is Limited to How Many Members

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (right) speaks outside the U.S. Capitol in March with other members of the U.Southward. House of Representatives, the size of which has stayed at 435 voting members for decades. Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (right) speaks outside the U.Southward. Capitol in March with other members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the size of which has stayed at 435 voting members for decades.

Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images

For decades, the size of the U.S. House of Representatives has pitted state against state in a fight for political power after each census.

That's considering, for the nigh part, there is a number that has not inverse for more a century — the 435 seats for the House'due south voting members.

While the House did temporarily add two seats after Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959, a police force passed in 1929 has prepare that de facto cap to representation.

Information technology has meant that one time a decade, states have had to face the prospect of joining a list of winners and losers after those House seats are reshuffled based on how the states' latest demography population counts rank. How those seats are reassigned besides plays a central role in presidential elections. Each state's share of Electoral College votes is adamant by adding its number of House seats to its two Senate seats.

For most of the Business firm's history, however, states did not lose representation later the national head count's results were released. Generally speaking, every bit the country'south demography numbers grew, then did the size of the House since information technology was commencement established at 65 seats by the Constitution before the first U.S. count in 1790.

At the land's founding, many framers were concerned that the original House was "mode as well small," according to Yale University constabulary professor Akhil Reed Amar.

"This might seem esoteric today, but you got to call back that the Constitution is the production of an American revolution. And that revolution was all almost a fundamental thought — no taxation without representation," says Amar, author of the upcoming volume The Words That Made Us: America'southward Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840. "If you're going to have big-fourth dimension taxation and anemic representation, people are going to say, 'Look a minute. We desire to exist taxed by people who know united states of america, who look like us, who understand the concerns of their constituents in their districts.' "

Afterwards the 1840 demography — and in one of the last decades before the 14th Amendment ended the census's counting of an enslaved person every bit "three fifths'' of a free person — Congress did drop the number of House seats from 242 to 232. The latest census numbers showed an increase compared with the 1830 results, only Congress could only concur on a smaller House size after Senate pushback over increasing the number of seats.

"And then information technology went back up and resumed the growth process again," says census historian Margo Anderson, author of The American Census: A Social History.

That growth plateaued afterward the 1920 demography, when Congress, for the first time in history, did not laissez passer a new police force about how to utilize the results of the latest national tally to reshape the House.

"The apportionment arrangement failed," explains Dan Bouk, an associate professor of history at Colgate University who has written a new written report for the inquiry found Data & Society about how lawmakers in the 1920s ultimately shaped the House's electric current size.

Some congressional leaders at the time pushed to get out it at 435 seats, the size it had grown into later on Arizona and New Mexico joined the union in 1912.

"The matter that really caused the apportionment to get hung up over and over again throughout the 1920s was the insistence of a set of leaders that the House of Representatives could no longer abound any larger," Bouk says. "They said it'southward about efficiency. They didn't want to pay for more than function infinite, to pay for more than Congress people and more than clerks. They believed the House couldn't be a deliberative body if information technology grew whatever larger."

While those kinds of arguments against making the House bigger were not new, they won out in 1929, when Congress passed the constabulary that fix an automatic process for reapportioning the House based on the existing number of seats.

"There's nil at all magical about the number 435 Congress settled on," Bouk adds.

In fact, there has been give-and-take over the decades about expanding the House, which would require Congress to pass a new police. But Bouk notes that the system for automatically redistributing 435 Firm seats after each census has created "a kind of inertia that makes such changes very unlikely."

Still, Anderson, the demography historian, says she's concerned nearly how representative the House actually is at this unchanging size. A century ago, at that place was one member for about every 200,000 people, and today, there's i for most every 700,000.

"Congress has the authority to deal with this anytime," Anderson says. "It doesn't accept to be right at the census."

And it might take to if, for example, Washington, D.C., or Puerto Rico becomes a country.

Until so, at that place will still be a fight for the power in 435.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/988865415/stuck-at-435-representatives-why-the-u-s-house-hasnt-grown-with-census-counts

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