Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

by Jesse Wegman

Rural lawmakers, who had long dominated American politics, fought back against this threat to their grip on power in two ways. At the state level, they refused to redraw legislative district lines to more accurately reflect where people lived. And in Congress, they froze the size of the House of Representatives itself, in the hope of locking in their numerical advantage in Washington as it slipped away everywhere else. Before 1920, Congress had virtually always expanded the House to keep up with the growing population. In 1911, that meant increasing the House to 435 members. In 1921, it would have led to the addition of nearly 50 more seats, primarily in the cities. But rural lawmakers blocked the decennial reapportionment of the House of Representatives that year. Today, with a national population more than three times as big as it was in 1920, the House remains stuck, effectively, in 1911. If it had continued to expand as it had for more than a century before, it would now consist of more than 1,500 members. In 1928, Emanuel Celler, a representative from New York, observed how the power struggle between urban and rural America infected every part of the House’s deliberations. The “thread of controversy,” he said, “runs through immigration, prohibition, income tax, tariff. It is the city versus the country. The issue grows more and more menacing.”29 Celler was right. The urban-rural clash would continue to intensify into the middle of the twentieth century. It reached its...

December 26, 2020. Page 125.