The topic of this episode is, “Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives?” My guest is Yuval Levin, who is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Levin is the founder and editor of the journal National Affairs, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. And, particularly germane to the subject of today's discussion, Yuval recently coauthored a report on the topic of expanding the membership of the House of Representatives. You'll find a link to that report in the program notes.Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.Yuval, welcome to the podcast.Yuval Levin:Thank you very much for having me.Kevin Kosar:The founders set the number of senators at two per state, but they did not set a constitutional cap on the number of legislators in the House. Why is that?Yuval Levin:Well, the nature of the Congress came out of a very complicated set of compromises at the Constitutional Convention. If you look at James Madison's notes on the convention, well over half of the debate was actually about this question of how representation should work. And ultimately, in some obvious ways, the large states wanted to be represented by population, the small states wanted each state to have equal membership, and the decision was made, “Let's do both.” So the two houses do have intentionally very, very different forms of representation: for the states and for the people. The House of Representatives is meant to represent the public. And so each member represents roughly the same number of people. State delegations are based on the size of their populations. The difference between the two houses in that sense is very intentional, and intended to create these kind of overlapping majorities that include both forms of representation.Kevin Kosar:All right, so the Senate is supposed to represent the states; the House, the people. Now, we have 435 members in the House, and we've had 435 for a long time. When was that number set?Yuval Levin:The House of Representatives at first grew after every census. From the very beginning, from the 1790 census all the way through the 19th century, with a single exception after 1840 for complicated reasons, the House grew as the population grew. That continued to happen until after the 1910 census, at which point there was the beginning of a normal debate in the House about how much should we grow and in what way this time. That debate fell apart, and the House ultimately at that...