Congress is planning to add two members to the House of Representatives, one for Washington, DC and one elsewhere. While the second seat will be for heavily Republican Utah in the short run, which is why Sentor Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) supports the measure, Utah would have gotten another House seat soon anyway while the DC seat will be asuredly Democrat.
Moreover, this will help lay the groundwork to make DC a state, which would add two Democrats to the Senate.
In 1937, FDR proposed adding six new Supreme Court justices to prevent the court from declaring unconstitutional various parts of the New Deal. The uproar in the country, for something that was constitutional but was a radical change in our governing processes, led to its defeat.
The number of representatives has been fixed at 435 for nearly 100 years, other than a temporary increase when Alaska and Hawaii became states. There is disagreement whether allowing DC to have representatives is constitutional, and such a fundamental change in our basic governing process and institutions needs to be thoroughly debated and discussed.
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