As Sabato notes, a bigger Congress would be harder to lobby. With representatives measuring in the thousands instead of the hundreds, there would be more targets. The return for lobbying any particular one would be small. And members representing smaller districts would presumably hew closer to the wishes of their constituents, making them harder to lobby toward positions their constituents don’t share.

And a Congress with thousands of members would have less mystique, which I think is also good. Government shouldn’t have a lot of mystique, since it’s a fundamentally shady operation that should be viewed with skepticism by the citizenry at all times. …

In the past I have jokingly proposed expanding the Supreme Court by letting each governor nominate a justice from his/her home state, while keeping the appointment of nine “at large” justices in the hands of the President. But the more I’ve thought about this, the less jokey it seems. A 59-justice court would be big enough to make it immune to sudden changes based on death by natural causes or otherwise. Choosing justices from the 50 states would also make it more diverse – possibly in terms of race and gender and so on, but certainly in other ways.

[I’m leery of any kind of structural change to either institution. Simply opening the debate runs risks of such reforms running off the rails and ending up worse than before. But it’s worth noting that New Hampshire might have the healthiest polity in the nation and that their state legislature is by far the biggest in terms of per-capita representation. — Ed]