Congress is broken. For thirteen years, polls have shown that even cockroaches are more popular than the legislative branch. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and has never recovered. A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not a stable foundation — so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
Many solutions have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites. FairVote advocates for ranked choice voting and proportional representation. The Congressional Reform Project has bold proposals like "increasing opportunity for Members to form relationships across party lines." Think tanks want to enlarge the House by a few hundred members, switch to a biennial budget system, spend more on Congressional staffers, and introduce term limits. There are op-eds in the Atlantic and New York Times. Matt Yglesias thinks proportional representation is the solution, and Nicholas Decker has an especially interesting solution.
These proposals have two things in common. First, they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents. Thanks to huge gerrymandered districts, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors, representatives have little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district. The second thing all these solutions have in common is that none of them will ever be implemented. They all involve acts of Congress — and members of Congress have no incentive to vote to change broken systems that currently benefit them.
Why would you want to stop gerrymandanding when it's the reason you don't have to run a real campaign to stay in office? Why would you vote to give yourself more work? Why would you vote to make it harder for people to give you money?
If reformers want to fix Congress, they need a solution that doesn't involve Congress. Luckily, such a solution exists: ratifying the Congressional Apportionment Amendment.
The Only A+ Ever Given At The University Of Texas
In 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, containing twelve Constitutional amendments meant to protect the American people. Ten of these twelve were ratified by the states and became law. Two failed and were forgotten.
Eighty-three years later — in 1872 — Congress voted themselves a pay raise. In fact, they voted themselves a pay raise effective as of two years prior, meaning that every member of Congress immediately received two years of back pay. The American people were outraged, especially after an economic crisis hit later that year.
In the midst of the backlash, a member of the Ohio state legislature remembered the failed eleventh amendment in the Bill of Rights, which read: "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." In other words, if Congress votes themselves a pay raise, it can't take effect before the next election cycle.
Ohio decided — better late than never — and became the 9th state to ratify the amendment, almost a century after the first eight. But it still wasn't enough, and besides, the American people punished Congress in a more traditional way: they voted the Republican majority out of office and handed the chamber to the Democrats.
Everyone forgot the eleventh amendment a second time.
One hundred ten years later — in 1982 — an undergrad at University of Texas in Austin wrote a paper on the pay-raise amendment, mentioning that there wasn't technically anything in the Constitution that said amendments have expiration dates. He got a C on the paper and reasonably turned that into a decade-long crusade to prove his history teacher wrong. He started a nationwide campaign to get state legislatures to ratify the amendment.
In 1992, he succeeded: the 38th state approved the provision, and it was added to the Constitution as what is now the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. The crusade worked; thirty-four years after the original paper, his political science teacher submitted a petition to the university to retroactively change his grade to an A+. Since there is no A+ on the official UT grading rubric, this became the only A+ ever given in the history of the University of Texas.
That means eleven of the original twelve Bill of Rights amendments have made it into the Constitution. There's only one left. It's been ratified by eleven states already. If twenty-seven more states agree, it will become the law of the land. It is the right to Giant Congress.
The Right To Giant Congress
Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:
"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."
In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.
Critics might note this description has an oddity — we'll cover it in the section "A Troublesome Typo" near the end.
The US is far bigger than in the Framers' time, so it's the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,641. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791.
This would give the US the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People's Congress of China. It would land the US right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar — the US currently sits at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction.
How Giant Congress Fixes The Problems
The various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.
Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.
This can be seen with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered.
Here are some real numbers from last election cycle: in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats). In many states, the new Congressional Apportionment Amendment-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.
As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite's presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian's. Under the amendment, both states would be about equal.
Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you've bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you're less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party.
Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it's less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper.
Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.
Critics might note this claim is questionable, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There's one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. A Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she's actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile.
The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election. But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents.
At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when state representatives and state Senators tell constituents about the good work they've done and ask for votes, they point to legislation they've passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.
Won't Congress Become Unmanageable?
At first, probably yes! The Capitol Building couldn't fit a 6,641 person Congress, let alone all of the extra staffers and administrative personnel who would come with it. We'd need to build a new monument to the largest democratic body in the history of the world.
But it would also become conceptually unmanageable, with individual members having more trouble networking with one another and sounding out consensus. The House would likely take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals.
Why Should I Support This?
Democrats: They're about to take a beating in the next census. California is moving to gerrymander its Congressional delegation, but it's also going to lose four seats. Texas is moving to gerrymander its delegation even more aggressively, and it's going to gain four seats. Florida is going to gain three. Illinois and New York are losing seats. Across the board it's bad news; while they might come out on top in this year's elections, they're going to lose the gerrymandering battle come 2030. Ratifying the amendment will make the battle that much fairer.
Republicans: They're about to take a beating in the midterms. The aggressive gerrymandering in Texas could easily backfire in a blue year, and California just passed the "I Hate Republicans" act to gerrymander that state as well. Ratifying the amendment is a way to blunt the effect, and let colleagues in Illinois and California and New England have their voices heard.
But there's a bigger reason for Republicans to want to support this. If they're a Republican in 2026, they exist to serve Donald Trump and his vision for America. They want to help Donald Trump recreate America in his image. The image of America will be the image of the new Capitol Building, and Donald Trump will lead this design. They saw how excited he was about the east wing of the White House; imagine how ecstatic he would be to get to design the Donald J. Trump Capitol Building. Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.
Third Parties: Libertarians, Communists, Greens and others are at their nadir right now. Zero state or national legislative seats are currently occupied by third parties, which is historically unusual. But increasing the size of Congress would give a shot in the arm to third parties. Getting 25,000 people to vote for you seems much more doable, especially if the whole party goes all-in on one seat. And it only takes one.
The Libertarians could likely win a Congressional seat in New Hampshire. The Communists could win one in Seattle. And once you get one seat, then it's off to the races. Getting national recognition as one of 6,641 is really hard — joining or forming a third party is the kind of thing that gets you press.
This is speculation with no data to back it up, but it's fully expected that there would be a big upshot in third party representation and membership. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment is exactly what the Libertarians need to break out of their funk.
State Legislators: They have an opportunity here. The most likely people to be elected to the new Big Congress are those who already have political experience and know what it takes to win an election in a small district. If they vote to ratify the amendment, odds are good that they'll be among those elected to fill the ranks of Big Congress. And they've always wanted to be in Congress — this is their chance.
A Troublesome Typo
If you've noticed something off about this description, good work — we mentioned it would be covered here.
The Constitutional text says "nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons" — which seems like it should read "less than." But maybe that's the point. Maybe the typo is intentional, and it's a feature, not a bug. The amendment was written in 1789 when the US had much smaller population; it anticipated growth but capped representation at certain levels.
The amendment has been ratified by eleven states already. Twenty-seven more states need to ratify it for it to become law. It's called the Congressional Apportionment Amendment — and it's the last rights amendment standing.