Nowhere in our constitution is there a limit to how large the House of Representatives can be. But the 1929 Reapportionment Act arbitrarily limits it to the familiar 435. Before then, the size of the chamber grew each decade, meaning that the number of constituents per representative grew slower instead. In fact, the United States capitol building even expanded to accommodate the new representatives multiple times. Since 1929, however, the average electorate size for each representative has almost tripled. 

As a result, the house continues to become less representative of American voters as a whole, as more constituents compete to have their voice heard by their congressman. Furthermore, this has made winning elections within each district less accessible to outsider candidates with less money or fame, due to the increased cost of campaigning and advertising to more voters. In an expanded house, more districts would mean more opportunities for a wider range of representatives from across the political spectrum to enter the house, possibly even from independent caucuses and third parties. Perhaps evidence for this can be seen in its sister chamber, the Senate, where the only two senators who have won as independent candidates come from Maine and Vermont, both in the 10 least populous states.

As other democracies have shown, a larger assembly is certainly feasible in the 21st century. The United Kingdom’s House of Commons has 650 Members of Parliament; Germany’s Bundestag 630; Japan’s House of Representatives and Poland’s Sejm 460. All of these countries combined have a lower population than that of the United States, yet each of them has significantly larger lower houses of their national assemblies. Even legislatures representing hundreds of millions of people, such as the European Parliament and Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies frequently have multiparty coalitions in power, all while only having a few hundred more representatives. Now is the time to bring a larger house to America.