Apportionment, or the process of determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, happens like clockwork at this point. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts how many people each state has and then uses that number to calculate how many representatives each state gets out of the 435 seats. In April, for instance, we learned from the reapportionment process that California would lose a seat for the very first time while Texas would gain two.
But despite some states losing seats while others pick them up, the reapportionment process is itself now fairly mundane. That wasn’t always the case, though.
“The first presidential veto was used on the apportionment law, so it’s been a hot issue from the very, very beginning,” said Margo Anderson, a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies the social and political history of the census. In fact, until the House was capped at 435 seats by the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act, each apportionment period was regularly accompanied by clashes over how to best divvy up political power in Congress — including the size of the House.
On the one hand, it’s probably a good thing that Congress is no longer debating the size of the House every 10 years. After all, the reason we have the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act in the first place is that Congress was unable to reach an agreement on how to reapportion the House for nearly a decade.
On the other hand, the fact that the size of the House hasn’t increased in more than a century is a real problem for our democracy. For starters, there is an ever wider gulf between Americans and their representatives, as the average number of people represented in a district has more than tripled, from about 210,000 in 1910 to about 760,000 in 2020. Moreover, some states are severely over- and underrepresented as a result.