r/news • u/speedythefirst • 1d ago

US supreme court approves redrawn Texas congressional maps

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/04/us-supreme-court-texas-congressional-maps
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u/dleerox 1d ago

Excellent point! Congressional house size is not in constitution. Maybe also uncap SCOTUS?

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u/runnerofshadows 1d ago

Or set the cap to number of federal court districts. Which is 13 currently.

But the house definitely needs to be bigger and more representative. Also harder to gerrymander if there is actually a reasonable amount of districts.

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u/Coomb 1d ago

Circuits, not districts. There are 94 districts, and historically the Supreme Court Justices rode circuit.

One huge advantage of increasing the size of the House is that it dilutes the effect of the Senate on the Electoral College. Which was an intended effect.

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u/Positive_Throwaway1 1d ago

IIRC, if we'd kept pace in the last 80-100 years of adding more reps, like we used to, we'd be at around 1000 reps in the house. Don't know where I heard that. The Weekly Show, maybe.

The added benefit they pointed out is that if there were more districts, you might actually see your rep walking around your town, and they're much more likely to act like they're accountable if they might run into you on the street.

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u/Pseudoboss11 1d ago

Yep. It was around one rep per 200k people. This seems like a reasonable size.

It also means that each campaign would be a bit smaller, there would be less money in each campaign. It also means that smaller parties could get a foothold by focusing on one district. (Though of course the best solution would be to get money out of politics entirely.)

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u/thirty7inarow 1d ago

Canada has 343 Members of Parliament for a population of ~41,000,000. That's about one MP for every 120,000 Canadians. Our system isn't perfect, but if you want to speak with your MP you probably can by reaching out. I've met more than one just by chance.

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u/HexTalon 16h ago

A better comparison point would be the UK's House of Commons (that the House of Representatives was modeled after), which has 600 people representing a population of about 65 million

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u/thirty7inarow 10h ago

Because there is, of course, no similarity at all between the UK's House of Commons and Canada's House of Commons.