| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe Reformers are once again looking at the possibility of increasing the size of the House of Representatives. The big virtue of this reform is that it could be accomplished by simple legislation, rather than needing a constitutional amendment, and that it isn't really a subject of partisan bickering right now, which means it at least appears to be plausible that it could happen. The problem with increasing the size of the House is that it probably wouldn't solve any of the problems it's supposed to address. In particular, increasing number of House districts enough to make representation happen on a normal human scale would produce an unwieldy legislative chamber of thousands of representatives. The likely results: either chaos, or a highly centralized body in which individual representatives had little or no importance. Neither of these would be good for healthy, meaningful representation. The more plausible reforms, on the other hand, would add relatively small numbers of representatives, and it wouldn't take long before population growth brought their districts back to about the same size they are now. In other words, in a nation soon to reach 350 million people, there's no realistic way for the national legislature to have districts that allow most people to know their representatives. Rather than increasing the size of the House, the best way to increase personal connections between members and constituents would be to throw money at the problem. Congressional staff budgets haven't come close to keeping up with the size of congressional districts over the last 30 years. Over that same period, the demise of local media has made low-cost communication with the district a lot harder, and perhaps impossible. Once upon a time, members gave interviews to local TV and radio stations that everyone in the district could watch and listen to, and were quoted on national and local issues in local newspapers that constituents could subscribe to. All of that, of course, is either gone or diminished. There are lots of reasons that the incumbency advantage in House elections has just about disappeared, but it certainly can't help that there's a lot less local media for incumbents to dominate. So instead of, say, quadrupling the size of the House, how about quadrupling (or more!) each member's budget? Yes, a lot of that money would be wasted or spend on frivolous things, but so what? Constituents might not have any better chance of knowing their representative personally, but they would have a better chance of visiting a district office, knowing a district staffer (or even a Washington-based one), and perhaps "knowing" their representative on social media. Of course, with a bigger personal staff, members might also increase their personal capacity for doing legislative work without relying on the party leadership. That would be good, too. In the 1970s, a reasonable objection to adding resources to individual members of the House would have been that it might make them invulnerable to electoral defeat. Today, House elections are nationalized, and so individual members are hostage to the fate of their parties. Whether restoring a bit of incumbency advantage would be a little good or a little bad, it certainly wouldn't be decisive. And it might even help Congress compete on more equal footing with the White House. 1. Catherine Wineinger at the Monkey Cage on obstacles blocking women in the U.S. House Republican conference. 2. Daniel Nichanian on criminal justice reform and the recent Pennsylvania primaries. 3. Mark Blumenthal on incentives for getting vaccinated. 4. Ed Kilgore makes the case for Republican future success. Certainly plausible, at least. 5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on inflation. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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