Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives? (with Yuval Levin)
Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives? (with Yuval Levin)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Mar 07 2022
Description: The topic of this episode is, “Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives?” My guest is Yuval Levin, who is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Levin is the founder and editor of the journal National Affairs, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. And, particularly germane to the subject of today's discussion, Yuval recently coauthored a report on the topic of expanding the membership of the House of Representatives. You'll find a link to that report in the program notes.Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.Yuval, welcome to the podcast.Yuval Levin:Thank you very much for having me.Kevin Kosar:The founders set the number of senators at two per state, but they did not set a constitutional cap on the number of legislators in the House. Why is that?Yuval Levin:Well, the nature of the Congress came out of a very complicated set of compromises at the Constitutional Convention. If you look at James Madison's notes on the convention, well over half of the debate was actually about this question of how representation should work. And ultimately, in some obvious ways, the large states wanted to be represented by population, the small states wanted each state to have equal membership, and the decision was made, “Let's do both.” So the two houses do have intentionally very, very different forms of representation: for the states and for the people. The House of Representatives is meant to represent the public. And so each member represents roughly the same number of people. State delegations are based on the size of their populations. The difference between the two houses in that sense is very intentional, and intended to create these kind of overlapping majorities that include both forms of representation.Kevin Kosar:All right, so the Senate is supposed to represent the states; the House, the people. Now, we have 435 members in the House, and we've had 435 for a long time. When was that number set?Yuval Levin:The House of Representatives at first grew after every census. From the very beginning, from the 1790 census all the way through the 19th century, with a single exception after 1840 for complicated reasons, the House grew as the population grew. That continued to happen until after the 1910 census, at which point there was the beginning of a normal debate in the House about how much should we grow and in what way this time. That debate fell apart, and the House ultimately at that point simply didn't act. And the size of the House remained as it was after 1910. Then afterward, after the 1920 census, the House actually actively decided to no longer grow after every census and passed a law that set a cap at 435, which was the size it had reached.For most of the 19th century, the House of Representatives grew by a formula that allowed states to avoid losing seats. So as the population grew, new seats were distributed in such a way that states with larger populations could grow, but no state would lose seats. That formula worked for political reasons, it made mathematical sense, and that's how things were growing until 1910. And we've been stuck at a 1910 level. So that has meant that as the country has grown—the population of the United States is almost three times what it was in 1910—the House of Representatives has not grown. Each member is now left representing about three times as many people as members did a century ago.Kevin Kosar:Yes, in the report that you helped coauthor, I recall seeing that in 1910 the average representative had 210,583 constituents. Today, seeing as there's 330 million plus Americans, there's about 761,000 constituents for each member of the House, which is a colossal number. Which leads to the next question: What would be the benefits of expanding the House?Yuval Levin:That question points to exactly where you just pointed to first and foremost, which is, we've reached a place where each member of the House now represents a massive number of people, about three quarters of a million people. At the beginning of our constitutional system, each member of the House represented just about a little over 30,000 people. That number went to 60,000 pretty quickly and gradually grew over time. But the idea originally—James Madison originally proposed a constitutional amendment that would cap that number at 60,000, so that the House would grow so that no member represented more than 60,000 people. We actually reached that number by 1830, and had that amendment been in place, we would now have several thousand members of the U.S. House, which I have to say, I'm glad we don't. But there's a balance to be struck. At this point, members represent such a vast population that it's very hard for them to be representative in something like the same way that members of the House were intended to be. So that's one very important first reason why an expansion might make sense: It would allow for members to represent a smaller number of people and therefore hopefully to represent them better. At the same time, there are also reasons to think that expanding the House could address some of the challenges that we face now when it comes to the way the House is run and to some of the problems that we find in our political culture. The proposal that we make in the report you mentioned would expand the House all at once by 150 members (which is roughly where we would be now if we had continued following that formula from the 19th century every 10 years since 1910) and then grow the House after that by that formula after every census. That kind of sudden increase by 150 members could provide for a moment of reform in the House, a moment where it seems like things could change and where members might be inclined to think about what other rules should change. How should the budget process change? How should the committee system change? There are a lot of reasons now to try to rethink some of these things. And there are a lot of members who want to, but there's a kind of standing inertia that holds them back from believing that changes like that are even within their power. A shot in the arm that they would get by having 150 new members could provide for a moment of reform, both within the House and in the states, for reforms of how members are elected, for experimenting with things like ranked-choice voting or other things. All of those could be advanced by a reform that gives that kind of shot in the arm.And you know, the reform itself I think of as just constitutional maintenance. It's work that should have been done this whole time that we haven't done and that we should be doing now. And then it could have these other secondary benefits, by encouraging reform-mindedness in general when it comes to how we think about the problems of the House.Kevin Kosar:I should mention to listeners that one of the complaints one hears from representatives in the House is that they feel grossly overscheduled—that they'll be in one committee meeting, but then they have to get up and leave and move to another committee gathering or a subcommittee gathering, or some such like that. Having to wear so many hats at once leads to them being in a position where they're doing everything, but not doing anything particularly well. Having more representatives, arguably, could mean having more committees and perhaps more eyes engaged in oversight. That noted, are there downsides to expanding the House's membership? I imagine a speaker of the House would have some apprehension at this prospect.Yuval Levin:First of all, as a conservative, I have to say, I think there are downsides to any change we make, and we should also expect that there will be downsides that we do not anticipate. That's certainly true when it comes to political reform. When you change the rules, things don't always happen the way you expect. It's hard to know exactly what the results would be, and we should always be aware of that when proposing reforms. There are also some downsides that are pretty predictable. A larger House could be more unwieldy—if you think part of the problem with the House is that it is unwieldy, which, as you say, the speaker of the House at any given time surely thinks. But anyone watching the House have trouble passing a budget or find itself breaking down might think, well, the answer to this can't be just more of