Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives? (with Yuval Levin)

Understanding Congress

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 these people. There surely are ways that the House would become harder to manage and to govern if it was larger.

There are also people who argue that the House would actually become more partisan if there were more members. In fact, there's a kind of argument along these lines from James Madison himself, in writing in the Federalist about the size of the House. Madison does think that the House shouldn't be so small that each member represents a massive number of people. But he also worries about the House getting too big. His worry on that front is that if it's so big that no individual member can really exercise much influence, then it would just be run by its leaders. At that point, the House becomes a force for aristocracy. Then the leaders become so powerful that they just manage these party coalitions, and no single member really makes a difference. That's certainly a concern you hear on this front.

I think the way to think about these problems is to think about scale. There's expanding the House, and there's expanding the House. If we took the House to 2,000 members, I think it would certainly be very hard to run. And it's probably true that you would just find it divided along party lines in very crude ways. On the other hand, you can think about parliaments and congresses and state legislatures that are larger than the House of Representatives, but function pretty well. If we're talking about adding 150 members to the House, that would take us to 585 members. That's still smaller than the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, which functions pretty well as a representative parliament. You can certainly still imagine that kind of House working more or less in the way it does now, while addressing some of the challenges it faces. So I think what this calls for is thinking about scale. The House has to be a face-to-face venue for bargaining. It has to be a place where members actually engage with each other, and not just a venue for mob action. But at the same time, the House is probably too small to be meaningfully representative. So we have to find a better balance.

Kevin Kosar:

When you look at the House today, one thing you’ll most certainly see is that there are any number of members who don't seem particularly interested in governing. As you've pointed out, they seem more interested in engaging in performative politics. One might object that expanding the House of Representatives is going to just lead to another 75 Democrats, another 75 Republicans who want to engage in performative politics, who will make the place worse. What do you say, or your coauthors say, to that objection?

Yuval Levin:

Certainly I think we should not imagine that this reform—or any reform—would be a silver bullet that would solve all of the House's problems all at once. And I certainly agree that it's not in itself a solution to that problem, which is a challenge that confronts the House because of the kinds of incentives that its members face and because of the way that its work is structured. At this point, the way to be prominent really isn't to devote yourself to committee work and become an expert in some important area of policy and rise through the ranks, but rather is to be a cable news personality, or a social media personality, and get known that way, and use the House as a platform for building your own brand.

I think that to address that would require some of the other reforms that I mentioned at the outset, that I hope might become a little bit more thinkable if the House grows. Ways of changing the work of the committees so that they might be more relevant—for example, giving committees a little bit of floor time, so that committee work actually mattered and members didn't have the sense that, well, whatever we do here is just going to get undone by the speaker when it's time to actually fire with real bullets. Changes to the schedule that allow members to spend more time together in Washington working on legislation. Some reforms of the ways in which the leadership is structured and how it interacts with members.

There are a lot of ideas out there. What we're lacking in a lot of these fronts is the will to do it, or the sense that it could be done. And I think expanding the House, as I said, could help that. But certainly by itself, I don't think that it necessarily addresses the problem of the performative member. I don't think that it aggravates that problem. I don't think it makes it worse. I don't think that it's the fact that the House is large that creates that problem. It exists in some ways in a bigger way in the Senate, where precisely because members have a bigger platform, because there are fewer of them, they're more inclined to think of themselves as working on a platform and building a following.

But I think you have to see these things as all connected. In a sense, the question of reforms of our system has to be addressed to the nature of the problems that system faces, and this challenge of how members spend their time is one of them, but by no means the only one.

Kevin Kosar:

Yes. Well, you hinted at this a bit earlier: the politics surrounding expansion of the House membership. The report notes this was a normal thing that Congress did for a very long time, and then a little over a century ago, it just stopped expanding the House. One thing that readers of the report might find interesting is that when you look at the numbers, it seemed expanding the House of Representatives is not going to advantage one party or the other, and is not going to affect who ends up as president. With those two things set aside, what then is stopping people from taking this seriously on Capitol Hill? Or is it the case that they are so caught up in worrying about the political calculations that they just don't believe it and just won't act?

Yuval Levin:

It's worth saying a word about that first point, the partisan valence point. You can imagine ways that a larger house might, as you say, affect not only the partisan control of Congress, but also the presidency, because each state's electoral votes are determined by the size of its congressional delegation. So if states have more seats in the House, they're also more weighty in the Electoral College. And increasing the size of the House—you can imagine ways that it could also empower one party or the other, give it a better shot at controlling Congress.

We ran a lot of models in the course of producing this report, and the outcome of those, which is also supported by now quite a lot of preexisting political science, is that there's not a particular partisan valence to this reform. It doesn't make it more likely that one party or the other would end up in control of the House. And it also doesn't make it more likely that one party or the other would be more likely to win presidential elections. If this change had been made before prior presidential elections, if the House were 150 seats larger in any presidential election year since 1972, which is the range of years that we ran the model through, the outcomes of all of those presidential elections would've been the same as they were with a bigger House. We did find that in 2000 there would've been a tie, and it would've been thrown to the House, but the House would've chosen George W. Bush, because that's the way the state delegations worked at that time. So, we would've ended up with the same presidents we have. And control of Congress would not swing in one direction or another by a statistically meaningful degree. So that's not the issue here.

So, as you say, why are members reticent? I think there are a couple of reasons. One is a general sense that just having more members in a sense devalues the currency of each member, that you become less important in the larger House as a single member of the House. I think that there's also a sense that a change like this is unpredictable. By definition, members of the House at the moment are people who benefit from the existing system. They've succeeded under these rules, and you're asking them to change the rules. So it takes some persuasion to get them to a place where they think that they wouldn't be disserved by those new rules.

One way that we've tried to address that problem is by thinking about the incentives they face. And this is not exactly our idea, this is the formula that was used to expand the House throughout the 19th century, very largely for this reason. The formula says that no state loses seats in the House after the census, that states can only gain or remain where they are. That's enormously appealing to existing members, because members always confront the possibility that their state would lose some seats, there would be redistricting, maybe their party doesn't control the state legislature, and they get redistricted out of their existing seat. This kind of reform offers them the promise of avoiding that risk so that at least there would still be the same number of members from their state. And by continuing to expand, you offer a kind of opportunity for creating more political offices for people to reach for, rather than fewer.

Nonetheless, I would say this is an idea that takes some persuading. The notion that the House should grow, that the House should change in some dramatic way, has to combat the existing standing inertia that members face. They worry about it, they think, "Hmm, I'm doing okay now. I don't know how I'd be doing under that system, so I'm not so sure." We're certainly starting, if not from scratch, then almost from scratch in talking to members about this idea. We've done since the report came out a fair amount of talking to members about it. There's some openness to it among members who are inclined to think about congressional reform, but I think a lot of members have never considered it. And when they first hear...