It was never supposed to be like this.
The official average is 761,169. In Delaware, a single representative answers to nearly one million people. No member of Congress in American history has ever spoken for more.
Many modern democracies still build their legislatures the way our framers intended — at ratios near, or even inside, the 1:30,000 to 1:50,000 range Madison wrote into his proposed amendment. We are the outlier.
Ireland's constitution still locks the ratio at the same range James Madison proposed for ours in 1789. They built what we abandoned.
The Constitution caps districts at no fewer than 1 representative per 30,000 people — a minimum, not a target. James Madison drafts a constitutional amendment to lock the ratio between 30,000 and 50,000 people, forever. It passes the House. It passes the Senate. It is sent to the states for ratification.
Intended ratio: 1 : 30,000 – 50,000Madison's apportionment amendment is ratified by eleven of the twelve states needed. It falls one short. The constitutional ceiling on district size never takes effect. For the next 126 years, Congress honors the spirit of it anyway — adding seats after every census as the country grows.
House size grows with the countryFollowing the 1910 census, the House expands one last time — to 435 members. Each represents about 210,000 people. It is, by any standard, the largest constituent ratio in American history. It is about to get permanent.
1 : 210,000Congress passes the Permanent Apportionment Act, freezing the chamber at 435 forever. Not by constitutional amendment. Not by referendum. By statute — passed by 435 men who had a direct interest in there never being more than 435 of them.
It has not been revisited in nearly a century.
Frozen at 435 by statuteHere is the part nobody tells you: no constitutional amendment is required to fix this. The 435 cap is a 1929 law, not a founding principle. Any session of Congress could introduce a bill, pass it through the House, pass it through the Senate, and put it on the President's desk. That is the entire procedure. It has simply never been politically convenient for the people in those 435 seats.
1 : 761,000 — and risingPicture a representative who lives down the road. Whose kids go to school with yours. Who you might run into at the grocery store, the high school football game, the polling place.
That isn't a fantasy. That was the design. The alternative — what we have now — has produced exactly the country you'd expect when representatives are unreachable, unaccountable, and structurally dependent on the people who fund them.
Both major parties instruct their members to spend roughly thirty hours per week on call time — dialing donors from party-run phone banks across the street from the Capitol. Internal Democratic Party schedules budget four hours daily for fundraising calls and just two hours for committee work and floor votes combined.
Every hour spent on the phone with bundlers and lobbyists is an hour not spent reading a constituent's letter, taking a meeting in the district, or talking to actual voters about an upcoming bill. The math is not complicated. Their attention is finite, and most of it is already sold.
None of this is conspiracy. It is the documented operation of a chamber so small, and districts so vast, that no member can survive without a full-time fundraising operation funded by people who are not their constituents.
A representative does not have to live in Washington. They can work from their actual district — holding office hours at the local library, walking the same streets as their constituents, voting remotely, traveling to D.C. only when the work genuinely requires it.
This is not theoretical. Congress already did it during COVID. From May 2020 through January 2023, House members voted by proxy from their home districts on more than a thousand pieces of legislation. The Republic did not collapse. The technology works. The Capitol bubble is a choice, not a constitutional requirement.
End it, and a representative's daily reality becomes their constituents' daily reality. The lobbyist who used to corner them in a Capitol Hill restaurant has to fly to Toledo, or Tucson, or Tallahassee. The donor on the phone has to compete with a real person at the town hall.
A smaller district fixes more of this than any other reform on the table.
A House of the people requires a House among the people.
And it does not have to stay this way.
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