None of the individual facts above is controversial. The House grew constantly for over a century. It was frozen by a single law passed for reasons that had nothing to do with democratic theory and everything to do with a 1920s political fight over immigration and urbanization. The country it represents has grown into one of the largest and most internally diverse nations on Earth — geographically, racially, linguistically, religiously, and economically — which is exactly the kind of country that should need more representatives, not the same fixed number decade after decade. The founders' own preferred design, including a proposed constitutional amendment that came one state short of ratification and is technically still pending, would require a House many multiples larger than today's. The chamber already includes non-voting members representing millions of Americans. The population has nearly tripled since the freeze took hold, while the number of seats has not moved at all. Every serious quantitative model for right-sizing a national legislature — whether built on cube roots, on the smallest state's population, or on more sophisticated comparative measures — puts the "right" number of U.S. House seats well above 435. Peer democracies with a fraction of America's population field legislatures nearly as large as, or proportionally much larger than, ours. American state legislatures, including Wyoming's own, adjust their size regularly without anyone treating it as a constitutional crisis.

And the consequences of staying frozen are not abstract. A House this size struggles to oversee an executive branch that has vastly outgrown it. It leaves most Americans without meaningful contact with, or a response from, their own representative. It drives up the price of a House campaign to the point that fundraising crowds out constituent service and donors crowd out ordinary voters. It locks in place a shrinking pool of competitive districts and an increasingly bitter, zero-sum fight over how lines get drawn. And it feeds exactly the kind of widespread sense of being unheard that research links to declining trust in democratic institutions and a growing appetite for anti-establishment politics — a dynamic Americans' own approval ratings of Congress make hard to dismiss as theoretical.