Post-Trump Reform Requires Reinvigorating American Democracy

After writing this article on the “status talk” on Tuesday, I heard TPM Reader AP say, amid general agreement, that it would add to the list or replace DC/PR statehood with expanding the House of Representatives. I just noticed now that I haven’t had a chance to respond to AP yet (I thought I did). But my answer was going to be that I basically agree. And as I suggested in the original article, although it was presented as a checklist of five questions/agenda items, everything after the first two (filibuster and Supreme Court reform) could have been reclassified as “extremely important things that really need to be done.” And to this list many more could be added. Going back to the original concept, the idea behind this list was not that it would be exhaustive, but that it was a good list to determine who was serious and who was not, who was worth supporting and who should go.

But this potential addition gives me an opportunity to expand on what a future era of reformism will need to accomplish, because the House of Representatives is a good case study of a number of key trends that have brought us to this moment. The number of representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929, when the U.S. population was approximately 122 million. This represents about a third of the current population. Residential neighborhoods now have an average population of just over 750,000 million. That’s a lot of people. The number was set when House districts had a population of just over 250,000 million. Now it’s 750,000. This is a huge and important difference since the House is supposed to be the body closest to the people.