Good morning John. You probably don't know this, but I was actually one of the first people in America to know that the Volt was going to be a thing. I got to interview the designers and the people working on the drive-train and the people who designed the concept car, and it was super cool and somewhere around here... I actually have an unopened box concept Chevrolet Volt. So yeah, I'm jealous. John, in the past few years I haven't visited you enough in Indianapolis, and frankly that's just because you didn't have a Volt. So, I'll see you soon! On my video about Puerto Rico a couple of days ago, I got a lot of questions about the House of Representatives and what it is, and how representatives are assigned, and why it exists. So today, I explain the House of Representatives, and I hope that's an okay way to end Brotherhood 2.0 week. Oh my god, it's already over! It went so fast, it was so difficult. So the House of Representatives, here's what happened. Back in the day, a bunch of white guys got into a fight. Some of them were like: "Arghh, every state should get the same representation in government!" And some of them were like: "No way man, omg, it should totally be based on population duh!" So those two very funny-sounding people reached across the aisle, as it were, and made a compromise. They created two branches of Congress: the Senate, which would have the same number of representatives for every state – two; and the House of Representatives, which would have a different number of representatives for each state based on how many people actually live in that state. The House started off with 65 seats, basically one for every 60,000 of the 4 million-ish people in America in 1790. At first, these geniuses were like, "Oh, let's just keep adding a chair for every 60,000 new people America gets. I'm sure that'll never be a problem!" Except that, of course, if we had kept doing that there would now be over 5,000 people in the House of Representatives. Around 1910, it became very clear that this was a terrible idea, because they were going to have to rename it the Stadium instead of the House. So they capped the number, right where they were, which was 435 – which is where we still are today, and I remember that number by saying the phrase "Need for Speed". Four letters, three letters, five letters, and of course it was the video game that I was playing in 1996 when I took civics. 435 isn't in the Constitution or anything, but it has been in place for a really long time, over 100 years, so it's really unlikely that that number will ever go up again. Today, as the population has increased and the number of seats in the House hasn't, we now have one representative for roughly every 700,000 people. But this raises a question, what happens if 700,000 people decide that Oregon smells bad – it doesn't, it's lovely, but just for the sake of argument – and the all move to Washington, which is pine fresh. Well now Oregon suddenly has more representatives than it deserves, and Washington has fewer. This is one of the reasons, if you're wondering, why we do a census. Because when we do the census, we then redistribute the representatives based on any population changes that have occurred. In this case, one of the representatives from Oregon would just lose his or her job, and there would be a new seat open in Washington for Washingtonian politicians to fight over. Now onto the case of, hypothetically, a whole other state joining our union. Because Puerto Rico has about four million people, we have to do a whole bunch of crazy math to figure out how to represent them properly in the House of Representatives. They'd automatically get two senators, just for being a state, and one representative, every state gets at least one. But in addition, it would also deserve four or possibly five representatives all its own. Now, because we can't add to the 435, we have to take those representatives from other places, based on the populations of those places. According to a nice, detailed report that I found on the internet, Florida, Washington, Texas, California and Minnesota would lose one representative each. Those representatives will be unable to run for re-election, and those seats would then be fought for by Puerto Rican politicians. So yes, Puerto Rico, because of its fairly large population, would have quite a bit of sway in the House of Representatives. Certainly more than Montana does. We only get the one. John, this concludes our week of Brotherhood 2.0-style videos, and it was really fun, and I wish we could keep doing it, it's just that we have all this other stuff to do with Crash Course and SciShow and stuff. Hopefully Nerdfighteria thinks that it's worth it. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. nerdfighteria.com. Go.