On Politics
Expand the House?
By PETER
BAKER
Published: September 17, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In America, democracy follows the simple principle of one
person, one vote, right?
Unless, that is, you live in Montana, where your vote carries a little more
than half as much weight in the House of Representatives as that of someone
living in Rhode Island. Or if you live in Utah, where your vote counts about
two-thirds as much as it would in Iowa.
With the 2010 Census around the corner, Washington and the various state
capitals will soon turn their attention to carving out congressional districts
across the nation. And once again, political leaders are preparing to cobble
together a patchwork quilt of districts that will leave some Americans
underrepresented.
Redrawing the lines will address some of the population shifts over the last
decade, but much of the disparity will remain, because it is built into the
system. In theory, every member of the House represents roughly the same number
of people. But because each state gets at least one seat, no matter how small
its population, and because the overall size of the House has not changed in a
century, the number of people represented by a single congressman can vary
widely.
The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest
Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in
the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just
one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting
power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000
in the other.
That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal
court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that
the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit
asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size
from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the
plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.
“When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities,” said Scott
Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has
organized the court challenge. “As an American looking at it objectively, how
can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is
substantially smaller than others’?”
Of course, a larger House may not thrill Americans who are tired of Congress,
and may make an already unwieldy body more so. “You may create a more equitable
system that’s less governable, and I’m not sure the country comes out ahead,”
said Kenneth
Prewitt, a former Census director who now teaches at Columbia
University.
Aside from the logistical challenges and expense of accommodating two or
three times as many representatives on Capitol Hill, the idea would certainly be
resisted by incumbents who jealously guard their authority. “It dilutes your own
power,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.
The issue traces back to the founding of the country. The Constitution
stipulated that every 10 years, the House should be reapportioned so that each
state had at lease one representative and that no Congressional district
contained fewer than 30,000 people. But it was left to Congress to decide how
many total House seats there should be.
The original House had 65 representatives, one for every 33,000 people. As
the country’s population grew over the next century, so did the size of the
House, until it reached 435 in 1911, when each member at that time representing
an average of 212,000 people.
But Congress refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census, as a wave of immigration
threatened to shift voting power from the South and Midwest to the urban
Northeast. Eventually, Congress voted to keep the House at 435 seats regardless
of rising population. Except for a brief period when it enlarged to 437 because
Alaska and Hawaii had joined the union with one seat each, the House has
remained at 435 ever since.
With each member now representing about 700,000 constituents on average, the
idea of increasing the size of the House has come up in recent years, but it has
not attracted much support. George
Will, the columnist, once suggested increasing the House to 1,000 seats, and
Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida, has introduced resolutions
seeking to study the matter, only to be ignored. A conference on Capitol Hill in
2007 explored the issue without leading to action.
“We have tripled our population since 1910,” said Jane S. De Lung, president
of the Population Resource Center, a nonprofit research organization that
sponsored the conference. Members have trouble staying in touch with so many
constituents, she said, and the population is only growing further. “If you
can’t do it with 700,000, how in the world are you going to do it with 1
million?”
To mount the legal challenge that is being filed on Thursday, Mr. Scharpen
recruited Michael P. Farris, a prominent conservative constitutional lawyer and
chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. Together they recruited
plaintiffs in five states that were relatively underrepresented after the 2000
Census — Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Delaware and Utah — and named as
defendants the census director, the commerce secretary and clerk of the
House.
Mr. Scharpen and Mr. Farris noted that some foreign parliaments are
significantly larger than the United
States House of Representatives — the House of Commons in Britain and the
Bundestag in Germany each have more than 600 seats with each member serving a
much smaller population. If there were more representatives serving smaller
districts, they argued, each would not have to raise as much campaign money and
could be more attentive to fewer constituents.
“It’ll be better government,” Mr. Farris said. “The proportional size of our
government is not consistent with other western democracies.”
The Supreme
Court opened the door to judicial intervention in redistricting with its
Baker vs. Carr decision in 1962 and then established the one-person, one vote
principle a year later in Gray vs. Sanders, but it has generally applied that to
equalizing districts within states, not across state lines. Montana sued after
it lost one of its two seats following the 1990 Census, but the court ruled that
Congress was within its authority to use the mathematical formula that it
applied to calculate how many seats each state would get.
The difference this time, Mr. Farris said, is that the courts have not
considered the proposed remedy of ordering Congress to increase the size of the
House: “Nobody’s ever asked them before.”
Now they’re asking.
Article Copyright © 2009 The New York Times
