President Obama giving the State of the Union in the House chamber.
It is very difficult to call the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors a "representative body." After all, LA County is home to roughly 10.4 million residents, and has just five county supervisors to represent them. What this means, for those averse to division, is that each member of the board is tasked with representing a shade over two million people.
A pending measure in the state legislature will increase the size of any county board serving a population north of two million residents from five to seven members. The measure, which is unsurprisingly opposed by the Board (more members = less power), would put a proposition on the ballot to make the change.
As LA Times writer Sarah Favot notes, however, this move has already been tried twice. In the presidential election years of 1992 and 2000, measures went before the voters of LA County to increase the size of the board from five to nine. Both failed. Miserably. The bottom line: it's hard to get people to vote for having more politicians.
But that doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea. And, indeed, at the federal level, it may well be worth considering. Follow me past the fold for my two cents on the matter (which is probably all it is worth, given the aforementioned lack of appetite for creating more politicians).
The House of Representatives, as most readers surely know, sits at 435 members. How we arrived at that figure, however, is quite the interesting backstory. As it happens one of our own members (Liberty Equality Fraternity and Trees) offered up that backstory as part of an essay on the subject in 2013:
After each decennial census, Congress had the constitutional obligation to pass a reapportionment bill. After the 1920 census, then, Congress should have passed a bill to replace the Apportionment Act of 1911 in accordance with the increase in population over the past decade. The political landscape, however, made that not quite so easy a task.
If Congress had followed the dominant apportionment method at the time (the Webster method), the number of seats in the House would have risen to 483 in order to comply with a long-standing norm that no state lose a seat upon reapportionment.
The reason for the delay lay in the urban-rural divide that we still see today. A mix of forces including World War I, rapid industrialization, and the mechanization of agriculture had accelerated the migration from rural states to urban states. The continuing immigration of population from Southern and Eastern Europe also fueled the urbanization of the country: more immigrants had come to the country in the prior decade than any other decade except the 1900s. Between 1910 and 1920, the urban population had swollen by 19 million and the rural population had fallen by 4 million.
The rural states, which (as we know) had disproportionate power in the Senate, had no intention of giving up their power any earlier than necessary, and they kept postponing the inevitable reapportionment, crushing bill after bill.
Eventually, in 1929, in order to make to avoid future reapportionment conflicts by making the process objective (and, essentially, automatic), the House was capped at 435 members, and future adjustments in the House manifest themselves as increases in some state delegations, offset by decreases in other state delegations.
The problem is that while the population growth rate has slowed in the United States over time, it has hardly stopped. Indeed the population of the United States as of the 2010 census was a shade over two-and-a-half times the population of the United States as of the 1930 census.
It is not out of the realm of possibility ... indeed, it is more likely than not ... that the average member of the U.S. House of Representatives will represent three-quarters of a million people by the time the 2020 census rolls around.
That's bad on any number of levels.
Start with the most basic concern—at some point, how difficult are you making it on members of the House to provide true constituent service to the people they are elected to represent? If we believe the rhetoric we all learned in grade school about the House of Representatives being the "people's House," at what point does it cease to be even minimally effective in that role because there are simply too many people to address and too few hours in the day?
With ever-increasing size of constituency comes an ancillary concern nearer and dearer to the kindred souls who are regular Daily Kos Elections readers—with an ever-growing number of votes needed to secure election, how much more expensive are the next generation of House elections going to be?
It is not a perfect ratio, in all probability, but when a district goes from roughly a half-million people to roughly three-quarters of a million, the cost of victory has to be expected to creep up noticeably.
Increasing the size of membership in the House would alleviate the above concerns, at least somewhat.
One could also make a compelling argument that it would make it at least incrementally harder to gerrymander with impunity with smaller House districts. Take, for example, the state of Alabama. While admittedly a distinctly red state, it was drawn into a six-to-one GOP advantage when the bulk of the state's core Democratic constituency (African-American voters) were shoehorned into an overwhelmingly black 7th Congressional district, which spreads from central Birmingham down through the western tier of heavily African-American counties that run across the south-central part of the state.
Imagine, hypothetically, if Alabama was granted two additional districts in order to bring the population per CD down to a more manageable 500,000-550,000 people per district. It would be extremely difficult for the creative cartographers who created the current map to not concede a second African-American district (which would certainly vote Democratic). There would simply be too many Democratic voters left over when the 7th would have to shed the roughly 160,000 voters necessary to bring it down to size. Any attempt to create an eight-to-one map would run the real risk of becoming a "dummymander," putting nominally Republican districts at risk.
For those frustrated by the current state of the Congress, it is worth noting that changing the size of the House would, by necessity, infuse a large quantity of new blood into the House. I, for one, have a more healthy skepticism of the benefit here, but your mileage may vary.
Because of the aforementioned lack of appetite for making new politicians, efforts to grow the House are pretty hard to find. Some members of the House, over the years, have expressed interest in the problem, but traction on the issue has been nonexistent. This rather quixotic effort launched some years back, advocating a return to a Constitutional-era ratio of one representative for every 50,000 people. This would require a mere 6000 or so seats, and would move the House of Representatives to the Verizon Center when the Capitals and Wizards aren't using it, presumably.
But there are more reasonable offers to be made. Going back to the idea of a set representative-to-population ratio, but at a smaller ratio than currently exists, is one idea. At one representative for every 500,000 people, for example, the House (as of the last census) would sit at 591 members. While a growth of over 150 members, this enlarged House would be still be considerably smaller than the British House of Commons, despite the U.S. having a population almost five times that of the United Kingdom.
Another idea is to keep the idea of the fixed size of the House in place, but simply increase the number. George Will, believe it or not, was an advocate in the past for expanding the House to 1000 members. And while the idea of a nice, round number has a bit of romance to it, even more modest growth (to, say, 600 or 700 seats) would alleviate the representation issue somewhat.
However, there are significant hurdles that make any alterations virtually impossible to implement. As was the case in the recent discussion over LA County's board of supervisors, there will be significant and vocal opposition from the membership itself. Any increase in the size of the chamber, of course, would serve to dilute their own power, and politicians are usually pretty prickly about any diminution in their own power.
What's more, the smaller states would certainly freak out. Many of them would remain unchanged (or little changed) in their delegation, while the larger states would see booming growth in their delegations. For example, California, under the 500,000 plan I outlined earlier, would go from 53 members of the House to 74 members.
Also, one could make a credible argument that such a move would be, at least in the short run, bad for the Democrats. With Republicans presently in charge of the redistricting process in the majority of the states, the GOP could take an already outsized edge in the House and cement it even further, even if some of those gains would be offset by making it marginally harder to racially gerrymander the South.
And, as has been flogged throughout this essay, in an environment where approval for Congress languishes in the teens, the thought of growing that particular institution is almost certainly a dead issue with voters, who would probably recoil at the very thought of it.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth debating, though. Which you are more than welcome to do in the comments (but keep it clean!).