Congressional Apportionment Amendment
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The Congressional Apportionment Amendment (originally titled Article the First) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that addresses the number of seats in the House of Representatives. It was proposed by Congress on September 25, 1789, but has not been ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures. As Congress did not set a time limit for its ratification, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment is still pending before the states. As of 2026, it is one of six unratified amendments.
Early in the 1st United States Congress, James Madison proposed a package of constitutional amendments designed to address the concerns of Anti-Federalists, who were suspicious of federal power under the new constitution. Congress approved 12 proposed amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment is the only one of those that has not been ratified. Ten amendments were ratified by December 1791, and are collectively called the Bill of Rights. An eleventh (Article the Second) was later ratified as the Twenty-seventh Amendment in May 1992. By the end of 1791, the Congressional Apportion Amendment was just one state short of adoption. However, no state has ratified the proposed amendment since 1792. Consequently, with 50 states now in the Union, ratification by an additional 27 states would be necessary for this amendment to come into force.
The amendment lays out a mathematical formula for determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives. It would initially have required one representative for every 30,000 constituents, with that number eventually climbing to one representative for every 50,000 constituents. However, there is some agreement that the last line contains a scrivener's error (see Mathematical discrepancies). As the amendment has not been ratified, Congress has set the size of the House of Representatives by statute. Congress regularly increased the size of the House to account for population growth throughout the 19th century until it fixed the number of voting House members at 435 in 1911, where aside from a temporary increase to 437 members from 1959 through 1962 after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union, it has remained.
The 2020 United States census recorded a population of 331.4 million; consequently, if the amendment were ratified today, it would result in a House of Representatives with at least 6,623 Representatives being required under the terms of the original House version of the amendment, more than twice the size of China's National People's Congress, the largest legislative body in the world.