Conventional wisdom is that the latest effort to shrink the size of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives is, for all intents and purposes, dead in the water.

The bill — HB 153 — that needs to win final passage this legislative session in order to go before voters was amended in a House committee last week, in a move that’s widely recognized for exactly what it is: a way to reset the four-year clock that’s required for any proposed change to the state’s Constitution.

The amendment, which reverts the bill to a previous version that would also shrink the 50-member state Senate, is both a sham and a shame. The functional version of HB 153 has passed numerous tests during its journey through the legislature.

It was approved by both chambers of the General Assembly in the 2015-16 legislative session, approved again in June by the state Senate, and then ... sat waiting in the House until Sept. 25, when Democrats and a couple Republican defectors on the House Rules Committee voted to upend the process.

This surprised precisely no one who has been watching Pennsylvania politics for any length of time. The bill’s prime sponsor, Rep. Jerry Knowles, R-124th, called it “typical Harrisburg shenanigans” in an interview Tuesday. And indeed, obstructionist members of the House tried this once before, in February, when they made the same changes and sent the bill to the Senate — which promptly stripped out the additional language and approved the original bill.

That’s led us to where things stand today, which in football terms is the equivalent of a small team of House members lined up a “victory formation” around HB 153, hoping to run out the clock.

Unfortunately for Pennsylvanians, the only victory these legislators will achieve is for themselves, not voters or taxpayers. And their actions aimed at derailing HB 153 are more evidence (as if anyone needed it) that the commonwealth’s General Assembly is broken and in need of reform.

A fundamental part of that reform is shrinking the 203-member House. Even if the chamber were to shrink to 151 members (the number proposed by HB 153) the chamber would still have more elected officials than Texas, California, New York and Ohio.

The chamber, as currently constituted, is far too expensive and recurrently proves itself incapable of addressing important issues like legislative redistricting and public pension underfunding — or even routinely accomplishing annual tasks like compiling a balanced, complete and on-time state budget.

In other words, House members have plenty of reasons to expect voters would jump at a chance to cut the chamber down to size. It’s time to stop delaying and give Pennsylvanians the chance to choose a better legislature.