We need to add 6,000 seats to Congress. I’m serious. | Opinion
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/05/25/congress-larger-size-house-representatives/90145889007/
We need to add 6,000 seats to Congress. I’m serious. | Opinion
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/05/25/congress-larger-size-house-representatives/90145889007/
34 Comments
at minimum it should have doubled in the 1950s
Our population has tripled since the house was capped in the 1920s. The house should triple, too. 1305.
This is by far the easiest solution to gerrymandering and it makes the electoral college counts more fair too. It should be seriously considered.
that’d be a step toward the 1 rep per 30k the founders wanted
Proportional representation system for multi person bodies.
Approval voting for single offices.
Congress has not been expanded in some time.
But if we want to institute structural reforms for the purpose of equal representation, then the end goal should be proportionate representation.
This would require a piecemeal approach though. Even just proposing setting up independent commissions in every state for redistricting would be its own nearly impossible task.
It would probably also require expanding and also amending the Court so that an actual code of ethics can be enforced.
Then we might actually have a chance of overturning Citizens United.
Which should also come alongside investigating and exposing campaign finance corruption, institutional and dark money groups, and foreign election meddling to the fullest and strictest extent. Then establishing whatever guardrails, funding, oversight and/or agencies are needed to confront these problems.
Also heavily regulating super PACS and proposing publicly funded campaigns while requiring 100% donor transparency and more immediate reporting on how campaigns are funded.
And of course crippling the power and influence of billionaires in our elections and policy making decisions.
We would also need to codify new voting rights into law that further inhibit or even criminalize voter suppression and election subversion efforts that have escalated post January 6th. These laws should also address the ways in which racialist and segregationist policies of the past have created lingering disparities and inequities.
Unfortunately, many of these ideas are considered “too radical” by today’s standards.
Ooh boy. We all have members we pay monthly to not even show up. This system needs to be addressed. We have that lady in Texas was found in a retirement home and a member in New Jersey has been a no call no show for months now. Just opens a floodgate of waste and fraud without addressing these issues.
YouTuber Mr. Beat has an excellent video on this and has convinced several congress members to add onto their agenda. Recommend everyone check him out his advocacy for uncapping the house.
Edit: Here’s the link to his video on this topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGkkXpVZxA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGkkXpVZxA)
A minimum of 1000 to bring us in line with what it was when frozen in 1929. That was a poison pill that took 50 years to start being a problem and has just kept getting bigger since.
It would massively help the triple threat issue of the electoral college, gerrymandering and lobbying.
100% there should be more seats in the House.
House members should also spend more time in their districts talking to constituents and be able to vote remotely.
The senate either needs reform or to be abolished also. Over 50% of the population lives in 9 states and by next census it could be 60% . That means 18 senators for 59% and 82 for the other50% . That was never the intention . Save me the smaller state crap.
Yes, but could they all fit in the ballroom? /s
We need a redesigned gov’t. Perhaps more stringently stepped tiers with a smaller figurehead assembly at the top. Yes, people need better more suited representation at levels that can overrule injustice at other levels, but they also need function & 6k people squabbling over law ain’t gonna get shit done when the few hundred we already have can’t.
We need a better solution than just more bodies & spending $1bil annually on salary alone.
Conservatives would argue about the costs involved in paying those extra salaries, perks and staff. In an era where they constantly tell us that we don’t have enough revenue (BS), be prepared for pushback.
Only 6000?
Been saying this for a long time. Glad to see it viewed positively.
All the reasons for the 1929 appropriations act that capped the house are now irrelevant due to advancements in technology and settling the west.
The lack of representation for the people has reached a point that it is merely a facade. Social issues are constantly covered in media to give people the illusion that representatives act on the behalf of the district they live in.
All while they loot the treasury.
I could go on for hours about this.
An old idea that the founding fathers considered before setting it aside as unrealistic from a practical perspective. But those concerns are outdated now and I am fully behind this idea. It would immediately make representatives more accessible to the American voters and, most importantly, and I cannot stress MOST IMPORTANTLY, it would break the two party system. I’m a lifelong straight ticket Democratic voter and I would love to vote for a different party that more accurately reflects my ideology.
I’m all for getting rid of the permanent apportionment act from 1929. I’d keep the ratio at the level just before the law was enacted. That would yield around 1500 congressional seats.
Everyone should read up on the real first amendment, [the one that was never ratified](https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2020/01/23/unratified-amendments/) that would give States the power to determine the size of the House of Representatives not the house itself.
It’s time Congress uncapped the house and provided proper representation in the people’s house.
Also allow remote voting cause no representative should have to live dual lives just to support their constituents.
Beyond the very legit, but often abstract political and legal reasons, a House where ever seat only represents 50,000 people fundamentally changes our relationship to our government.
If your district was only 50,000 people (and protected by gerrymandering laws to be reasonably compact), you might know your representative, but you’d probably know someone who knew them. So instead of every election being given a choice between:
1.) Businessman you’ve never heard of.
2.) Lawyer you’ve never heard of.
3.) Corporal P.O.G. you’ve never heard of.
Your choices will instead probably feature at least one well known pillar of your community. Instead of fielding 50-250 phone calls a day from people who can’t afford to donate money to his re-election campaign, your rep will get maybe a dozen calls from people they actually knows or at least knows of. They only have to raise enough money to reach 50,000 people, so attempts to bribe them will run up against the practical realities of, “well if people think I’m a crook, they’ll just vote for Mrs. Jackson, the social studies teacher at Riverside High. She organized half the door knockers last year, and is the biggest person in the local party after me.”
A House with smaller districts means a government more connected to people, in short: More Representative.
If New Hampshire, with 1.36 million residents, can have 400 House members, the US can have far more than 435 voting members!
The founding father decided taxation without representation. Today the UK has about 60 Million people, and had 600 ministers in the house of commons. If we were to scale that to the US 330+million people, we would need a minimum of 3300 respresentatives in Congress to have equal representation of the English.
This and get rid of the Senate and electoral college
6000 is too many to be functional. It should be another few hundred or so.
I support expansion but if 6,000 is your starting point you’ll just get laughed at.
I mostly agree with this. My take is there should be 1 House rep for every 100,000 people, 1 Senator for every 1,000,000 people, and 1 Supreme Court Justice for every 10,000,000 people. So there should be about 3500 Representatives, 350 Senators, and 35 Justices.
If left unreformed, the Senate should be either abolished or drastically curbed with most of its power shifted towards the House, which represents the people far better than the Senate does. The Senate is a relic of nobility where land mattered more than people.
I’d like to see the Senate reformed into a national parliament where seats are apportioned by party votes. So if 10% of people vote Green, 10% of Senate seats are Green.
In this system voters would vote both for a party for Senate and directly for a Representative. The Senate would represent the overall direction of the country while the House represents the concerns of specific small groups of people.
We don’t need that many. But instead we could copy Germany’s system. You get two votes for the legislature: one is for a person. The other is for a party. For the first vote, the person who wins the plurality gets the seat. For the second vote, people from the party lists fill in the rest of the seats for any party that gets more than 5% of the vote. It is guaranteed that if a party (or a coalition) has the most votes it gets the most seats. Gerrymandering doesn’t work. They actually add “overhang” seats to make sure that the ratio of representation comes out right. An independent can still win a seat if they are popular locally.
cubed root has seen fairly significant real world testing for this application , that would put it at about 740 house members
6000 is probably not realistic, but it should absolutely be significantly expanded. For comparison, the House of Commons in the UK Parliament has 650 members representing a population of 69 million, meaning each member represents about 106,000 people, in contrast to the nearly 800,000 people each US Representative represents. And on top of that, their House of Lords, somewhat (but not really) akin to our Senate, has another 752 members. So their parliament has a total membership of 1402, compared to our Congress of 535. Their parliament is nearly three times the size of our Congress, even though our population is nearly five times larger than theirs.
at this point i think government would function better with a random lottery or draft, like jury duty.
it wouldn’t be the best thing, but apparently better than the circus in town.
We’d be a lot less susceptible to tyranny of the minority which is what we have now
I am 100% down for this. We need reps who are more beholden to their constituents, and for that to happen, we need more manageable district sizes.
Sounds great. We also need to get rid of this arbitrary 2 senators per state. We’re grossly misrepresented.
With the tech we have nowadays, I think every voter can represent themselves directly.