4/20/2021
Stuck At 435 Representatives? Why The U.S. House Hasn't Grown With Census Counts
Breaking Newstags: Congress, census, House of Representatives, apportionment
For decades, the size of the U.S. House of Representatives has pitted state against state in a fight for political power after each census.
That's because, for the most part, there is a number that has not changed for more than a century — the 435 seats for the House's voting members.
While the House did temporarily add two seats after Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959, a law passed in 1929 has set up that de facto cap to representation.
It has meant that once a decade, states have had to face the prospect of joining a list of winners and losers after those House seats are reshuffled based on how the states' latest census population counts rank. How those seats are reassigned also plays a key role in presidential elections. Each state's share of Electoral College votes is determined by adding its number of House seats to its two Senate seats.
For most of the House's history, however, states did not lose representation after the national head count's results were released. Generally speaking, as the country's census numbers grew, so did the size of the House since it was first established at 65 seats by the Constitution before the first U.S. count in 1790.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel