Federalist Paper

Is there a way to change Congressional apportionment in the House to make it “fair”?  If yes, how? If no, why not?

Article I section II of the Constitution sets up the House of Representative as being the house of congress with equal representation among all American citizens. For most of American history this has been accurate, each representative having almost an equal number of citizens within their districts. However, as the American population took off in the early to mid 20th century and more people moved from the country to the cities, the equal distribution of representation has decreased. Congress capping the number of House representatives at 435 seats in 1929 only made this problem worse. It has increased the number of citizens each seat represents and has widened the gap of how many people one representative represents such as the case of Wyoming and Montana. Wyoming’s house member represents 579,315 citizens while Montana’s represents over a million. This means that a citizen in Wyoming has more of a voice in Congress than a citizen in Montana. They will also have a better chance of contacting and voicing their opinions to their representative then Montanans. Another glaring problem with representation is the fact that there are American citizens who have absolutely no voice at all. People living in legal American citizens. With the Constitution stating that all citizens will have equal representation in the House, we are denying this given right to over 4 million American. The only way to fix this by removing the cap of 435 seats and redistributing seats to be more even. Many politicians will argue against this due to it possibly increasing the number of seats one party has over the other. However putting partisanship aside, all Americans should want everyone to have an equal voice in the House. Seats should be given to DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam based on their population sizes and congress should divide seats in a way that makes the margin of difference of how many citizens a representative represents as small as possible. Equal representation among citizens should be an important issue for any politician because if it’s not the case then the government is going directly against how it was intended to be.