Is It Reasonable To Keep The House at 435 Members?

[Free Palestine]

I think it's awful that states lose representation simply because they do not grow as fast as other states, or because another state is admitted into the union, simply to maintain an arbitrary size of 435 members, which was set at a time when the U.S. had a fraction of the modern population.

[Free Palestine]

Haha no it is certainly not reasonable. I would say increase it to a nice even 500, and then keep it that way for at least a century.

That wouldn't really solve the problem.  You'd soon have a system where each member of the House represents more than a million people.  And people wonder why the House is a semi-oligarchy. 

[Free Palestine]

Yeah, really. We need at least a thousand members of the House to get reasonable and adequate representation. And no, I'm not joking. I'd want around 3,000 members. 1 per 100,000 people seems reasonable to me (and is what the relatively far more functional FPTP systems in Britain and Canada use, vaguely).

I'd be happy with one for every two-hundred-thousand.

The only legislatures that have existed, to my knowledge, that have had a thousand or more members have been the rubber-stamp legislature of the Soviet Union, and the Chinese legislature, which is likely ineffective for other reasons besides it's huge size.  So, we don't really know if a thousand-person legislature would be so ineffective.

[Free Palestine]

Yeah, really. We need at least a thousand members of the House to get reasonable and adequate representation. And no, I'm not joking. I'd want around 3,000 members. 1 per 100,000 people seems reasonable to me (and is what the relatively far more functional FPTP systems in Britain and Canada use, vaguely).

I've never seen an example of a cohesive legislature with more than about 800 members.

I haven't seen a legislature with more than eight-hundred members, except in China and the Soviet Union, and the problem with those should be obvious.

[Free Palestine]

while 1 per 100,000 would be ideal on a local basis, I think maybe that should be the goal on the state level. Federally, a 1000 member Congress may be the most appropriate number (but no more than that)

Indeed.  The federal government shouldn't be more representative than the states.

No one seems to want to address the fact that the personal relationships keeping Congress working would be scarce and less valuable in a chamber of 1,000.

Members of Congress are elected to represent their constituents, not their party or their buddies in Congress.

[Free Palestine]

Each member of the California State Senate represents more people than a member of the House of Representatives.

I think it would be reasonable to make the California legislature unicameral, unless you do something wonky with how the Senate is elected.  I don't see the point in just having two houses with no difference except the number of people each member represents.