The screen door on my porch has dragged across the threshold for most of a summer. It came with the house, and before that it hung on Grammina’s back porch in a county I won’t name, because she would consider it gossip. It drags because the top hinge has worked loose. The screws backed out of wood that has been opening and closing since Eisenhower, and the door sagged an eighth of an inch at a time until one morning it scraped.
My nephew came by in August, watched me shoulder it open with a cup of coffee in my hand, and told me what a sensible young man would tell an old one: buy a new door. They sell them pre-hung now. Frame and all. Pull the old one out, set the new one in, done by lunch.
I thanked him, and after he left I went to the shed for a screwdriver, a few longer screws, and a toothpick dipped in wood glue for the stripped hole. It took twenty minutes. The door swings fine. It still has Grammina’s paint on it, three coats deep, and it still squeaks on the downswing the way it did when I was nine and trying to sneak out to the creek.
I have thought about that door often this autumn, because the country is having the same conversation my nephew and I had, only with higher stakes and less coffee.
The Pre-Hung Door
The fashionable remedy this season is to amend the Constitution and do away with the Electoral College, so that the President is chosen by a single national tally. I’m going to decline the invitation to argue whether that would be good or bad. Reasonable people land on both sides, and I’ve found that the argument tends to become a proxy for whichever election last disappointed the person making it.
I will grant the premise underneath it, because the premise is sound. The balance has drifted. A citizen in a small state carries more weight in choosing a President than a citizen in a large one, and the gap has widened over the past century to a degree the framers would recognize as a defect. A Wyoming voter’s share of an electoral vote is something close to four times the share held by a Californian. The complaint is legitimate. My quarrel is with the tool being reached for.
A constitutional amendment is the pre-hung door. It is the whole frame, pulled out and replaced. Sometimes that is the right job; the Thirteenth Amendment was a new door, and the house is better for it. But before you tear out a frame, you ought to check whether the trouble is in the hinge. In this case it is, and the hinge has a name: the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
Where the Screws Backed Out
The Constitution set a floor and a ceiling on representation and then trusted Congress to keep the House growing with the people. Article I says the number of Representatives “shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand.” On the last day of the Convention, George Washington rose for what was nearly his only remark of the summer to ask that the proposed ratio be lowered from forty thousand to thirty thousand, so that the people would be closer to their representatives. The delegates agreed without a fight. They understood that a republic depends on a citizen being able to find his congressman, and on the congressman being able to find him.
For more than a century the House grew after each census, as the framers expected. Then, after the 1920 count, Congress could not agree on how to apportion seats, and for the only time in our history it simply didn’t. A decade passed. In 1929, to avoid repeating that embarrassment, Congress passed a law that set the House at 435 seats and made the reapportionment automatic. The number was never chosen by the Constitution. It was a temporary convenience that has now lasted nearly a hundred years.
In 1929 the average congressman represented about 280,000 people. After the 2020 census the figure is over 760,000. The country grew; the House did not. That is the stripped screw hole.
And here is the part of the mechanism that I find gets passed over. The Electoral College is built from the House. Each state receives electors equal to its Representatives plus its two Senators. The two-Senator bonus is what tilts the scale toward small states, and its weight depends entirely on how large the House is next to it. With 435 Representatives, those 100 Senate-derived electors make up nearly a fifth of the College. Grow the House, and the same 100 electors become a smaller and smaller share of the whole. The small-state advantage remains, as the framers intended it should, but it shrinks back toward a thumb on the scale and away from a fist.
One commonly discussed benchmark, sometimes called the Wyoming Rule, would set the size of a district at the population of the smallest state. That alone would put the House somewhere near 570 seats. Others propose more. I’m not wedded to a number; Grammina taught me that the right amount of glue is the amount that holds. The point is that Congress can repair the hinge by ordinary legislation. It requires a majority in each chamber and a signature. It requires no ratification by thirty-eight states, no national convention, and no redesign of the way we choose a President.
On Maintenance
I don’t want to be mistaken for a man who thinks the Constitution is finished. Madison didn’t think so; he spent his first session in Congress drafting amendments. The document needs maintenance, the way a house does, and some of that maintenance will someday be structural.
My objection is to the order of operations. Before we rewrite the rules, I’d like us to apply the ones we have, fully and honestly, and watch what they do. We have spent the better part of a century leaving the House frozen, then diagnosing the resulting imbalance as a flaw in the design. That is like refusing to tighten the hinge and then blaming the carpenter who built the door.
The same principle holds for the problem of the rogue official, which is the other reason people give for wanting a new frame. The Constitution gave us tools for an officeholder who abuses his trust. Each house can expel a member with two-thirds of its vote. The House can impeach and the Senate can remove. Congress controls the purse, can compel testimony, can hold officials in contempt, and can write the law the executive must follow. The courts can rule, and the voters can decide again in two years, or four, or six.
We use these tools timidly, or along party lines, or not at all, and then conclude that the tools are inadequate. A lock that nobody turns cannot be blamed for the open door.
Applying the rules has a cost that I’ll admit I don’t enjoy. If they are applied honestly, they will sometimes produce an outcome I find distasteful. They will occasionally keep in office someone I’d like to see gone, because the evidence or the votes weren’t there. They will occasionally remove someone I agree with, because the evidence and the votes were. A rule that only binds the other fellow is a weapon, and a republic that keeps its rules as weapons has stopped being a republic. If we want to know whether the machinery works, we have to let it run, and accept the result when it comes out of the press, before we decide the press needs replacing.
A Confession of Sorts
I’ll admit I have stood on the other side of this. There was an evening in some November not long ago when I sat on this porch with the radio on and wanted the whole apparatus torn out by the roots. It felt righteous. It felt like the kind of thing a serious man ought to want.
It passed by morning. What remained was a quieter suspicion that my anger had less to do with the design than with the result, and that the design had been starved of maintenance for so long that I couldn’t fairly judge it. I would like to see what the College does when it sits atop a House that has been allowed to grow. I suspect it would surprise both its defenders and its critics.
The Principle
A republic is maintained by people willing to do the small, unglamorous repair before the grand one. Expanding the House asks less of us than an amendment, and in some ways it asks more, because it requires Congress to vote to dilute the power of its own sitting members, and requires us to hold them to it. That is a test of civic character, and I’d rather we take that test before we take the larger one.
My nephew was right that a new door would have been easier to explain. The old one is still hanging because somebody bothered to look at the hinge.
Grammina, who misread Franklin with great confidence, used to tell me: “A stitch in time saves you from buying a new shirt, Nate — and the new shirt never fits as well.”
-N
PS Regular readers will recognize the subject. I’ve written to you about the size of the House before, and I suspect I’ll write about it again; a man who keeps bees learns that the same hive needs checking more than once a season.
