A proposed solution to fix Congress has a unique advantage: it doesn't require Congressional approval to implement. Scott Alexander argues we should ratify an amendment from the Bill of Rights that most people have forgotten -- one that would increase House representatives from 435 to over 6,000. The idea sounds absurd until you realize it almost happened before.
The Problem With Congress
Everyone hates Congress. A poll showing cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and congressional approval has dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn't recovered since. A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives lacks a stable foundation.
Many solutions have been proposed by think tanks -- FairVote advocates ranked choice voting, others want to enlarge the House by a few hundred members, introduce term limits, or switch to proportional representation. These proposals share two things: they correctly identify that members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents, and none of them will ever be implemented.
The reason is simple. 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 stop gerrymandering when it's the reason you don't have to run a real campaign? Why would you vote to give yourself more work?
The Solution That Doesn't Need Congress
The answer lies in an old amendment that never got ratified -- the Congressional Apportionment Amendment from the original Bill of Rights. Eleven states have already ratified it. If twenty-seven more states agree, it becomes law without any Congressional vote.
This isn't a new idea. It comes up every few years and gets little traction. But there's a remarkable precedent: the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.
In 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights with twelve Constitutional amendments. Ten were ratified. Two failed and were forgotten. Eighty-three years later in 1872, Congress voted themselves a pay raise -- retroactive to two years prior. The American people were outraged.
A member of the Ohio state legislature remembered the failed eleventh amendment, 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. Ohio became the 9th state to ratify the amendment in 1872 -- almost a century after the first eight.
But it still wasn't enough, and Congress escaped consequences again.
One hundred ten years later, in 1982, an undergraduate at the University of Texas wrote a paper on this pay-raise amendment. He got a C. He turned that into a decade-long crusade to prove his history teacher wrong. In 1992, he succeeded: the 38th state approved the provision, and it was added to the Constitution as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.
Thirty-four years after the original paper, his political science teacher submitted a petition 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.
Eleven of the original twelve Bill of Rights amendments have made it into the Constitution. There's only one left -- the right to Giant Congress.
What Giant Congress Would Look Like
The Congressional Apportionment Amendment would require one Representative for every thirty thousand people initially, eventually capping at one Representative per fifty thousand citizens. Since the US is far bigger than in the Framers' time, it's the 50,000 number that would apply today.
This would increase the size of the House from 435 representatives to 6,641. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. The US would have the largest legislature in the world, topping China's 2,904-member National People's Congress.
Would this solve Congressional dysfunction? It would be a step in the right direction.
Gerrymandering many small districts is harder than gerrymandering 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.
In Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% 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 amendment-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature.
Money in politics becomes much harder to coordinate among people. 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.
As for polarization: in a district of less than 50,000 people, there's less incentive to go viral on national issues and more incentive to connect with constituents. People already trust their state representatives more than Congressional representatives.
Why Support This?
For Democrats facing the next census, California is losing four seats while Texas gains four -- ratifying means fairer representation. Republicans in midterms face aggressive gerrymandering backlash; this blunts the effect. Libertarians and third parties are at their nadir with zero national legislative seats -- getting 25,000 people to vote for you seems much more doable than millions.
Critics might note that increasing representatives to over 6,000 would create practical problems. The Capitol Building couldn't fit such a Congress, and individual members would have more trouble networking with one another. This would necessitate a more parliamentary form of governance where negotiations happen between parties rather than individuals -- fundamentally changing how Congress operates.
Eleven states have ratified an amendment from the original Bill of Rights. Twenty-seven more will give Americans the largest legislature in human history.
Bottom Line
Alexander's strongest argument is its strategic cleverness: a solution that bypasses Congressional self-interest entirely by leveraging state ratification instead of Congressional votes. The historical precedent of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment proves this can work. Its biggest vulnerability is practical -- a 6,641-member House would be conceptually unmanageable and require fundamental structural changes to how legislation works. But that's a problem for later; the vote hasn't happened yet.