Congress needs to be way, way bigger

James Madison in particular worried that representatives would have too many people to look after. Overpopulate the House districts, he cautioned, and members “would not possess enough of the confidence of the people, and would be too sparsely taken from the people, to bring with them all the local information which would be frequently wanted.” To preserve the House’s direct link to the public, he proposed a Constitutional amendment capping the size of each district at 50,000 members.

Had Madison’s amendment been adopted, America would today have approximately 6,500 lawmakers. In fairness, that might be a bit unwieldy. But there’s no reason Americans should be capped at our current 435 representatives. Up until 1910, when Congress conducted its constitutionally required reapportionment of the House after each census, it also adjusted the size of the chamber, in all but one case increasing the total number of seats. As a result, while the number of Americans-per-representative went up in the 120 years since Madison’s proposed amendment, that growth was fairly steady and slow. During the 1918 flu pandemic, each member of Congress had approximately 240,000 constituents.

But in 1920, Americans were flocking to cities, and rural lawmakers from both parties, unwilling to cede more seats to fast-growing urban centers, refused to do their constitutional duty and reapportion House seats among states.