Is It Reasonable To Keep The House at 435 Members?

[Vazdul (Formerly Chairman of the Communist Party of Ontario)]

I don't think its very reasonable, but a better question would be "Is it practical to increase the size of the House every decade?" I agree that it's more difficult for coherent districts to exist as the population of each district goes up, but how long will it be before the size of the House becomes too large for the House chamber? The government will have to start renting football stadiums for joint sessions of Congress.

I've seen some people on this forum advocate the "cube root rule," where the number of seats is equal to the cube root of the population. If we apply this rule to the 2010 population, the House would have about 675 members, or about one per 460,000 people. This seems a bit more reasonable, but it's still possible for states to lose representation. If the population increases by 10 percent between now and 2020, the size of the House will only increase to about 700 members- an increase of only 3.7%. If one of the larger states lags behind in growth, it could still lose representation to other, faster growing states. The only real way to guarantee that states don't lose representation is to make the cutoff point the minimum number of seats where no state would lose representation.

[Vazdul (Formerly Chairman of the Communist Party of Ontario)]

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.

I don't know if "personal relationships" are really a good thing in politics. Representatives need to defend the interest of the American people, and personal relationships can be an obstacle to that.

^
This.

I would much rather have representatives who have personal relationships with their constituents than with other politicians.