[bavent]

Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.

[CalChris]

For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.

Yeah, it's pretty messed up.

[interestica]

Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.

Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.

[dehrmann]

But 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.

[dangus]

China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population.

The US also has state representatives in every state.

This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.

Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.

[theoldgreybeard]

The federal government isn't supposed to "run the country".

[bavent]

I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.

The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.

Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.