# Congressional Apportionment Amendment (Proposed September 25, 1789) > After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment — originally designated "Article the First" — was proposed by Congress on September 25, 1789 as part of [[James Madison]]'s package of twelve amendments submitted to the states. Ten of those twelve were ratified in 1791 as the [[Bill of Rights]]. One other — prohibiting congressional pay raises from taking effect until after an intervening election — was ratified 203 years later as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment (see [[Minor Amendments]]). This amendment, which would have established a mathematical formula tying the size of the House of Representatives to population, was never ratified. ## What It Would Have Done The amendment established a sliding formula: one Representative for every 30,000 constituents initially, scaling to no more than one per 50,000 as the population grew. The principle was that House members should represent small enough constituencies to remain meaningfully connected to their constituents — the Anti-Federalist concern that a distant national legislature would be unresponsive to ordinary citizens. Had the amendment been ratified, the House today would have somewhere between 6,000 and 11,000 members (depending on how the formula's ambiguities were resolved), rather than the 435 seats fixed by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. ## Ratification Status By 1791, ten states had ratified — one short of the eleven needed (from the original fourteen states, including Vermont, admitted in 1791). No state has ratified since 1792. Because Congress set no ratification deadline, the amendment is technically still pending, but ratification by an additional 27 states would now be required. It is the oldest pending proposed amendment to the [[Constitution]]. ## Why It Matters for the KB The Congressional Apportionment Amendment is less analytically load-bearing than the [[Corwin Amendment]] or the [[Equal Rights Amendment]], but it illuminates a structural feature the KB tracks: **the fixed House size concentrates power and reduces representational quality.** The Founders assumed the House would grow with the population. [[James Madison]] and the Anti-Federalists agreed that small constituencies were essential for genuine representation. The 1929 decision to cap the House at 435 members — driven by the practical difficulty of accommodating more legislators and the political interests of incumbents who preferred larger districts — meant that the average House district grew from roughly 210,000 people in 1910 to over 760,000 today. Each House member now represents more constituents than a Senator from the least-populous states. The fixed size also amplifies the malapportionment problem: because every state gets at least one Representative regardless of population, and the remaining 385 seats are distributed among states of wildly different sizes, the ratio of representation varies significantly. Wyoming's single representative serves about 577,000 people; Montana's two representatives each serve about 542,000. Meanwhile, a representative from a large state might serve over 780,000. This malapportionment, combined with the Senate's structural overrepresentation of small states and the [[Electoral College]]'s incorporation of both, compounds the structural advantage that less-populated, more rural, more conservative states hold in the federal system. The amendment the Founders proposed would have prevented this outcome. That it was one vote short of ratification in 1791 and has been forgotten since is itself a data point: structural reforms that would dilute incumbents' power tend not to advance. ## See Also - [[Unratified Amendments]] — the hub page for all six unratified amendments - [[Constitution]] — the document the amendment would have altered - [[Bill of Rights]] — the ten amendments ratified from the same package - [[Minor Amendments]] — includes the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, the other "orphan" from Madison's original twelve - [[James Madison]] — proposed the amendment as part of his twelve-amendment package - [[Electoral College]] — the institution whose malapportionment the fixed House size compounds - [[Popular Sovereignty]] — the principle the amendment was designed to protect