Ezra Klein had a great post this week about how the number of House members, 435, hasn't increased since 1911! As a result, we have one representative per 709,760 people in the country, the largest it has ever been and larger than all other representative democracies.
This got me thinking, how many members of the House should there be? To alleviate the issue, and make it truly representative, I have a fairly easy solution. Tie it to reapportionment and the census and take the US population divided it by the population of the smallest state. The last census results counted the American population as 308,745,538 people, with Wyoming as the smallest state with a population of 563,626. So, (308,754,538/563,626) = 548 members of the House. It would break down this way:
Alabama - 9
Alaska - 1
Arizona - 11
Arkansas - 5
California - 66
Colorado - 9
Connecticut - 6
Delaware - 2
District of Columbia - 1
Florida - 33
Georgia - 17
Hawaii - 2
Idaho - 3
Illinois - 23
Indiana - 12
Iowa - 5
Kansas - 5
Kentucky - 8
Louisiana - 8
Maine - 2
Maryland - 10
Massachusetts - 12
Michigan - 18
Minnesota - 9
Mississippi - 5
Missouri - 11
Montana - 2
Nebraska - 3
Nevada - 5
New Hampshire - 2
New Jersey - 16
New Mexico - 4
New York - 34
North Carolina - 17
North Dakota - 1
Ohio - 21
Oklahoma - 7
Oregon - 7
Pennsylvania - 23
Rhode Island - 2
South Carolina - 8
South Dakota - 1
Tennessee - 11
Texas - 45
Utah - 5
Vermont - 1
Virginia - 14
Washington - 12
West Virginia - 3
Wisconsin - 10
Wyoming - 1
It breaks down fairly equitably, even giving the District of Columbia one representative of its own. Of course, as I've said before, this makes too much sense, so someone will prevent this from happening.
Also, I haven't done the Red State/Blue State/Purple State breakdown yet. I'd be curious to see how that would change from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment