Ok first a disclaimer and then a backstory.
The disclaimer: this has absolutely nothing to do with the current House at all, or anything that the current House is voting.....the only connection between this and the current House, is that there is only 435 of them, which is unconstitutional.
Now the backstory: I have a co-worker who likes trivia, and is usually impossible to stump. And today I got him. The question I asked him was how many amendment were SUPPOSED to be in the bill of rights? the answer, which he didnt know, was 12.
Two of the proposed amendments failed because not enough states would ratify them, the proposed 1st and 2nd amendment. Now a while ago I wrote a blog about the fate of the proposed 2nd amendment, and how it actually DID finally become an amendment. But after stumping my coworker, I thought about the proposed 1st amendment, and realized that without it the US House of Representatives is unconstitutional.
See Article 1 Section 2 Clause 3 of the US Constitution deals with the composition of the U.S. House of Representatives, and states in part
"The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;"
Now further amendments have changed some of the other wording of Art 1, Sec 2 Clause 3, namely removing the 3/5th clause with the 14th amendment, but the part I quoted stayed untouched.
So at one Representative per every 30,000 people as mandated by the Constitution, would mean the House of Representatives needs to have 10,570 members.
Which for those bad at math is a bit over 24 times it's current membership.
So why don't we have 10,135 more members of congress?
Because it turns out there are times where we all think the Constitution needs to suck it, and because we god damn said so.
No really thats it. in 1921, the Census revealed that the new make up of congress would require 483 seats, which the House physically didnt have room for in its chamber, and most of those seats would be in brand new districts, displacing many incumbent members. So congress passed a law changing the size of districts
So in 1929, just prior to that census, congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that basically said "fuck it, we are sticking with the current number of seats" because they didnt want to keep dealing with the problem of size and shifting geographic centers of population and changed the system totally, where seats could be taken away from and given to states based on population, but no more could be added or subtracted from the total.
Which is the system we have today, even though it openly flies in the face of the US Constitution.
Of course, in order for that the matter someone would have to sue the government, and bring a case to the Supreme Court, as only then, with a case in front of them could the SCOTUS use the process of Judaical Review to declare the system controlling the size of the House unconstitutional and force compliance with the Constitution.
But since most everyone is happy with 435 members of congress, and NO ONE thinks 10570 members of congress is a good idea, no one really wants to sue, so nothing can be done about the current issue with the House.....we just all ignore it and pretend nothing unconstitutional is going on because its a hell of a lot easier.
Which brings us back to the proposed 1st amendment. It reads as follows:
"Article the first... After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every forty thousand persons , until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."
Basically what that means in layman's terms is for every 100 representatives we need to seat, we increase the amount of people allowed to be represented by a single Representative.
0-99 Representatives: 1 Representative for (up to) every 30,00 people
100-199 Representatives seated: 1 Representative for (up to) every 40,00 people
200-X Representatives seated: 1 Representative for (up to) every 50,00 people
Now I put X because the amendment stops at 200+ Reps and 50,00 people. Which would still be 6342 members with todays population.
But if we applied the idea behind the amendment it would work like this
300-399 Representatives seated: 1 Representative for (up to) every 60,00 people
400-499 Representatives seated: 1 Representative for (up to) every 70,00 people
And so on and so forth
Now no matter what, we are still looking at more than 1000 Members under that standard.
So I fully admit we would need an additional amendment to modify the pattern set up in the proposed amendment (say by multiplying the cap by a factor of 10....which incidentally by the way would get us pretty close to the current numbers in the house, on average each members district is made up of 709,760 people, just a hair over the what would be 700,000 person limit) to keep things reasonable.
And I'll be honest, I dont really expect either the proposed first or the additional needed tweak amendment to ever actually become law (in part because why would you pass an amendment you'd instantly have to amend?) so I dont think it will follow in the footsteps of the proposed 2nd/27th.
But I got to be honest, I do find it fascinating that no only did the founders very quickly see this flaw in how they wrote the original Constitution AND even laid out a way to fix the problem....only to have that fix totally ignored in favor of a "what constitutional limit...we will set our own arbitrary limit" approach.
Usually we are pretty careful to at least we as a country are claiming we are following the example and vision of the Founders. However they say every rule has an exception......and the US House of Representatives is apparently that exception.
