en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929 for anyone curious
scintilla@crust.piefed.social 6 days ago
The cap on HoR seats is possibly one of the worst things that have ever happened in american democracy.
Feyd@programming.dev 6 days ago
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
It’s incredible to me just how many people don’t even know it’s a thing! Schools still just uncritically teach that the house has proportional representation, but it simply doesn’t!
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
It has proportional representation, it’s just really big portions.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
No, a vote is literally worth more in Iowa than it is in California. It’s not proportional.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Each vote is approximately equal in the house which is the proportional body.
DrBeerFace@lemmy.world 6 days ago
1000% true. Makes it so much easier for unpopular, minority ideas to make a much bigger impact because it limits voting power of the majority. Without the current arbitrary limit, you’d set the number of congressmen each state gets by the least populous state divided by 3 (since each state gets 2 senators and at least 1 representative). That state is Wyoming and they have just under 600,000 people. With 1 congressman per 200,000 people, California alone would have 196 representatives and 2 senators.
The best option is to rewrite the constitution and put some population restrictions on state representation in Congress (because why does a state with less people in it that the unrepresented city of Washington DC have 3 congressmen?!). But as that seems very far away, the best thing that would be done is to get rid of the cap on representatives and let all Americans have an equal (representative) vote in Congress.
Plus with 1,555 representatives (plus 100 senators) we can loosen the two party stranglehold on this country.