Congress froze the House at 435 seats in 1929. Yes, they did it themselves, among thmeselves, without approval from us. So today we vote for dire representation deficiency yet again...
Article the First, by contrast after being approved in the House and Senate in 1789, was passsed to to set a trajectory: once the House reached 200 members, Congress would regulate the ratio so there would be "not less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons".
So result is stark: the average district now holds about *760,000 to 777,000 people*. A single representative today speaks for a constituency **15 times larger** than Article the First envisioned.
The case for fixing this isn't nostalgia. Smaller districts would make gerrymandering far harder. They'd also pull representatives closer to the "proper knowledge of the local circumstances" of their constituents that James Madison feared would be lost in an oversized district.
Article the First remains dormant, not dead — it has no expiration date and will soon be ratified as our 28th Amendment. Let's finally make representation scale with us to take our House back!
