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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Did a little reading on this, here’s what I found:

    The house has been “capped” or at least limited in size the whole time actually!

    The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;

    Now that we count everyone and not just white people, that’d be a max somewhere in the range of 11000 representatives without a constitutional amendment.

    11000 is probably too many people to try and assemble in one room and come to any sort of consensus, so you’d have to artificially lower the number somehow.

    It turns out that the legislature is allowed to set it’s own size, but both the House and the Senate have to agree. The current size of 435 members comes from the Reapportionment Act of 1929, so it’s been established for a while.

    I think my favorite option is the “Wyoming Rule” and it works like this: smallest state gets one representative, and everyone else gets representatives based on how many times their population is more than that of the smallest state. Under that rule the house would have 574 members, which still feels like a relatively reasonable amount of people

    e: herp derp,you never had to own land to be counted