A Wildly Undervalued Tool For Restoring U.S. Democracy
ProjectNoCap.com
Congress capped the House of Representatives at 435 seats in 1929 and has kept it at that number for almost a century. The country has added more than 200 million people since then. The number of representatives has stayed at 435. The cap is a statute Congress wrote, and Congress can remove it the same way it imposed it.
Article I, Section 2 allows one representative for every 30,000 people and guarantees each state at least one seat. It sets no maximum number of members. For its first 120 years the House grew as the country’s population grew. It went from 65 members in 1789 to 435 by 1913, adding seats after almost every census. After the 1920 census the House failed to reapportion at all, the only time that has happened. Rural members feared the growing population of the cities, much of it from immigration, and refused a reapportionment that would reassign seats to urban states. The disagreement lasted nearly a decade. Congress ended that failure with the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, signed on June 18, 1929. Through that act Congress kept the House at its 1913 size of 435 and created an automatic formula to redistribute those seats after each census. The figure has stayed at 435 ever since, apart from a brief rise to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii became states.
1. The representation ratio has more than tripled. The average House district held 210,328 people after the 1910 census and 761,169 after the 2020 census. One member now represents more than three times as many people as a member did in 1913, while the chamber stayed the same size.
2. The figure 435 comes from a 1929 statute that kept the 1913 count. The Constitution sets no size for the House. There was “no sanctity in the number 435,” Representative Ralph Lozier of Missouri said during the 1929 debate, and he asked why that number should be fixed for a growing country.
3. Your share of a representative depends on which state you live in. District populations vary widely because no district crosses a state line and the total is held at 435. After the 2020 census, Delaware’s single district held 989,948 people and Montana’s smaller district held 542,113. A Montanan and a Delawarean each elect one House member, but the Montanan’s member represents about 450,000 fewer people, so each Montanan holds a larger share of a House member.
4. The United States seats fewer representatives per person than any comparable democracy. Political scientists since Rein Taagepera, “The Size of National Assemblies” (1972), have found that most democracies size their lower chamber near the cube root of the population. The cube root of the 2020 United States population is about 692, so a House sized by that standard would seat 692 members instead of 435. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that the United States has one of the largest differences between its chamber size and that cube root, and the largest average constituency of any established democracy. The United Kingdom seats 650 members of the House of Commons, about one for every 100,000 people.
5. By holding the House at 435, Congress increases the small-state advantage in the Electoral College. Each state’s electoral votes equal its House seats plus its two Senate seats. Because the House stays at 435, the national total stays at 538 electors, and the two-senator addition remains a large share of a small state’s count. After the 2020 apportionment, one electoral vote represented about 190,000 people in Wyoming and more than 700,000 in California. Adding House seats would add electors to the largest states and reduce that difference.
6. Large districts are easier to gerrymander. Each of the 435 districts now contains about 761,000 people, and the people who draw the lines set partisan outcomes for large blocs of voters at once. Smaller districts hold fewer voters per line, which reduces how much mapmakers can manipulate the result.
7. One member for every 761,000 people limits how much direct contact any single constituent can have. No member can speak with most of the people in the district. Paid lobbyists and organized donors, who can contact a congressional office reliably, gain influence over a member relative to ordinary constituents as the district grows.
8. The founders designed the House to expand with the population. At the founding the average district held about 38,000 people. Growth in the number of representatives was the normal response to a growing country, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 (1788), and he described the census as the means to readjust apportionment over time. Members today represent roughly twenty times as many people as members did at the founding.
9. Congress fixed the House at 435 to end its failure to reapportion after 1920. The number is a 1929 compromise, and 435 was simply the count already in law from 1913. Ending the disagreement mattered more to Congress at that moment than choosing a correct size for a representative chamber.
10. Congress can uncap the House with an ordinary statute. The number 435 is set in federal law at 2 U.S.C. 2a, so changing it requires no constitutional amendment and no state ratification. Congress raised the number many times before 1929 and can raise it again.
Find your representative at the House directory, then call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask the operator to connect you to that office. You can also use the contact form on the representative’s official website.
Set a clear deadline. Ask your representative to email you a written answer within two weeks, and to post a public statement supporting repeal or amendment of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and pledging to cosponsor a bill to expand the House.
Post what they send you, whether it is a yes, a no, a vague non-answer, or silence after the two weeks pass. Put it in an online space your community uses, such as a local subreddit or a neighborhood group, and ask people what they think of the response. A larger House costs little and gives every person more direct representation in their own government.
You can also reach out to your local County Democratic Party, Indivisible Chapter, or other activist group and request they add uncapping the U.S. House of Representatives as an officially endorsed policy, and to share that decision with their members and endorsed representatives.
The No Cap Fund runs a single-issue, bipartisan campaign to uncap the House before the 2030 census, for readers who want to spend more time on this than a single phone call. ProjectNoCap.com is another good option.
_Additional note: there’s a socio-psychological phenomenon called the Bystander Effect, where people assume someone else will act, so no one does. I mention it because we have millions of readers, and The Existentialist Republic needs 10 new subscribers per article to keep the lights on. We have hit that on only 1 of the last 16 days. Please don’t let an activist journalism publication be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent. But if you value this work, we need you to keep this machine crafting tools for destroying fascism._
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