On expanding the House of Representatives

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Jazz Shaw

November 2, 2014

 

On Tuesday there will be 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives up for grabs as voters go to the polls. Well… at least in theory there will be. In reality, as Charlie Cook rates it, 370 of those seats are so completely safe for the party / incumbent holding them that they aren’t worth talking about. Another 39 in the likely or lean categories may be close enough to provide a little local excitement, but are highly unlikely to change. At the very bottom of the barrel there are just 26 seats out of 435 (or 5.9%) which are either too close to call or in danger of changing sides.

 

If we have this many carbon copies showing up every two years, who on Earth would want to massively increase the number of these political creatures? But it seems that there is a case to be made in some quarters, such as by Brian Frederick, that we need 680 Representatives, not 435.

 

(Snip)

 

I saw this story at Outside the Beltway, where Doug Mataconis has assembled quite a collection of references on the history of how we arrived at the magic number of 435 and why it hasn’t budged in so long. It’s well worth a look, and I won’t try to reproduce it all here. But would increasing the chamber membership to 680 – or even 6000(!) – improve anything?

 

(Snip)

 

In my never very humble opinion, if you want to shake things up in Congress, increase the level of competitiveness and draw in new blood on a regular basis, we need to go to a new method of redistricting, probably left up to computer models designed to create contiguous, compact districts in as much as is possible. It doesn’t address all of the perceived challenges described above, but it would at least be a start and might be more doable than trying to create roughly 250 more districts.