The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it.

435. That's how many people are in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the legislative branch of the United States government. The country's founders expected the House to expand along with the country. But that number, 435, hasn't changed in about 100 years, even though the US population has tripled in that time frame. Some scholars think that imbalance helps explain why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them.

435. 미국 정부 입법부의 하원인 하원의원 수예요. 나라의 건국자들은 하원이 인구 증가에 따라 확대되길 기대했어요.

Here's the thing that you really care about, which is, you know, whether you can get the ear of somebody who represents you, whether you can find that person in your district. The more people that person represents, the less likelihood you can get the attention of that person.

여러분이 정말 신경 쓰는 건, 여러분을 대표하는 사람의 귀에 말이 닿을 수 있는지, 여러분 지역에서 그 사람을 찾을 수 있는지예요. 한 사람이 대표하는 사람이 많을수록요.

>> But this one congressman thinks it's time to think bigger than 435. >> If you were going to make government more democratic, what would that look like? Why don't we continually expand the House? It's something that would make us more representative. It's something that would give more representation to the parts of the country where people actually live.

하지만 이 한 하원의원은 435보다 더 크게 생각해야 할 때라고 생각해요. 정부를 더 민주적으로 만들려면 어떤 모습일까요? 왜 하원을 계속 확대하지 않나요?

>> Representative Sean Casten of Illinois has presented a bill that would continuously expand the House as the country's population grows.

일리노이주 하원의원 Sean Casten은 나라의 인구가 증가함에 따라 하원을 지속적으로 확대하는 법안을 제출했어요.

But will adding more seats to the House actually be a good balance of effective governance and representation, or will it only add more chaos and gridlock?

하지만 하원에 의석을 추가하는 것이 효과적인 통치와 대표성의 좋은 균형이 될까요, 아니면 더 많은 혼란과 교착만 추가할까요?

So 435 isn't in the Constitution. It actually says this, "The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000, but each state shall have at least one representative." But we got rid of this idea pretty quickly.

435는 헌법에 있는 숫자가 아니에요. 헌법에는 이렇게 적혀 있어요. '대표자의 수는 3만 명당 한 명을 초과하지 않되, 각 주는 최소 한 명의 대표자를 가진다.' 하지만 우리는 그 숫자를 버렸어요.

>> That seems crazy today. We would have a house that would be astronomically large if we kept that number in place. It was thought of as a guideline and the Constitution is in many ways an aspirational document. Now, what the framers did enshrine was that the census would determine the number of representatives for each state. As long as the house was aortioned or divided off of that, it was constitutional. So, for over a 100 years, we did that modestly adding seats through aortionment acts as the new states joined the union. But after World War I, the population shifted to urban centers.

오늘날엔 미친 것 같아 보여요. 그 숫자를 유지했다면 하원이 천문학적으로 커졌을 거예요. 지침으로 여겨졌고 헌법은 여러 면에서 열망적인 문서예요.