Amendment XXVI

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified July 1, 1971.

From Nate:

"If you can die for your country in the military, you should be able to vote" – for the politicians who send young Americans into harms way.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation ...

One thing that Congress does not do is set standards for voter registration or for voting machines. And, Congress does not fund these enterprises. Currently, each state and local jurisdictions perform these functions.

A disaster arose in Florida in the presidential election of 2000. The election was so close, and punch card ballots were not counted if the counting machines could not determine whether a voter selected a candidate. If the punch wasn't completely empty, the counting machine did not recognize the vote. This came to be called "hanging chads " by the industry which manufactured these machines.

Congress had no say in the matter. Voting has been under the supervision of the state legislature and had enacted a rule for an automatic recount. However, the recount had a deadline if Florida was going to be able submit its votes for the Electoral Collage without negative consequences.

The Florida Supreme Court weighed in – with dubious state constitutional authority.

Two cases were submitted to the Unites States Supreme Court addressing different issues.

Finally, two hours before the Electoral College deadline, the Supreme Court ruled that the original ruling by Florida's Secretary of State that George W. Bush had won the popular vote. Candidate Al (Albert) Gore, Jr., conceded the next day.

The Supreme Court majority (5 to 4) ruled based on the spirit of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; ... nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Some constitutional scholars believe that the federal Supreme Court made the right decision but based on the wrong grounds. A lot has been written about the subject, but something similar could happen again (see ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE FLORIDA SUPREME COURT, Bush v. Gore, Case (00-949), [December 12, 2000], Cornell University Law School Supreme Court Collection, February 1, 2006, accessed December 7, 2009).

Reconstruction

According to Ginsberg, Lowi, and Weir:

Protected by the presence of federal troops, African American men were able to exercise their political rights immediately after the [Civil] war. During Reconstruction, blacks were elected to many political offices: two black senators were elected from Mississippi and a total of fourteen African Americans were elected to the House of Representatives between 1869 and 1877. African Americans held many state-level political offices. As voters and public officials, black citizens found a home in the Republican Party, which had secured the ratification of the three constitutional amendments guaranteeing black rights. ... This political equality was short-lived, however. The national government withdrew its troops from the South and turned its back on African Americans in 1877. In the Compromise of 1877, southern Democrats agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to become president after a disputed election. In exchange, northern Republicans dropped their support for the civil liberties and political participation of African Americans (pages 161-62).

Amendment XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave;
but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified July 9, 1868.

From Nate Segal:

The federal government promised to pay pensions to men who fought for the Union. This was supposed to include all the African-Americans who joined the Union army. I'm not sure what the government actually did. Although slavery had been abolished, racism didn't go away.

According to authors Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, abolitionists had to struggle with the federal government so that black soldiers would be paid the same amount as white soldiers. "In June of 1864 President Lincoln had asked Attorney General Edward Bates his opinion on what the government legally owed these men [black men in the military] in terms of equal payment." (Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, New York: Walker & Company, 2008, page 221)

With this amendment, former slaves became full citizens of the United States and also full citizens of the state that they lived in. Former slaves are now being counted as one full person instead of as three-fifths of a person.

I get mixed up. Three Fifths or Five Thirds?
(www.53.com)

One Person, One Vote, Right?

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

California Would Lose Seats in Congress

By Nate Segal

Republican Senator, David Vitter of Louisiana proposes not to count immigrants in the 2010 census - even when they are documented immigrants.

We would have two classes of people in the U. S. One class lumps together all immigrants, even those who are following the process of naturalization; students who are here for several years, but don't where they will get jobs; employees of multinational businesses which need executives and people of talent to run American divisions; to mention only a few cases.

An issue that would come up immediately is "taxation without representation." Members of the above groups pay taxes, but Vitter's proposal denies them representation.

Immigrants own houses and pay real estate taxes in good faith. They enroll their children in our public schools. They need police and fire protection as much as the rest of us.

Is Senator Vitter proposing to exempt immigrants from Social Security and Medicare deductions? To be fair, many immigrants may never draw on their Social Security accounts.

Furthermore, multinational businesses might be less likely to do business with the U.S. on civil rights grounds. What kind of democratic ideal do we present to the world by pretending that people who actually live here don't really live here? The result, Americans lose jobs.

Those of us who are citizens make up the other class of "inhabitants."

Voting is a separate issue. One must be a citizen. This is understandable.

Nate Segal

California Would Lose Seats Under Census Change

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: October 27, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

A Republican senator’s proposal to count only United States citizens when reapportioning Congress would cost California five seats and New York and Illinois one each, according to an independent analysis of census data released Tuesday. Texas, which is projected to gain three seats after the 2010 census, would get only one.

The proposed change would spare Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania the expected loss of one seat each. Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Carolina would each gain a seat.

If every resident — citizens and noncitizens alike — is counted in 2010, as the Census Bureau usually does, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Utah would gain one seat each and Texas would get three, the analysis found.

Losing one seat each would be Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to the analysis of census data through 2008 by demographers at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Appealing to his colleagues in states with fewer noncitizens, the Republican senator, David Vitter of Louisiana, warned this month that a vote against his proposal would “strip these states of their proper representation in Congress,” while including noncitizens would “artificially increase the population count” in other states.

Mr. Vitter’s proposal, which would generally benefit nonurban areas where Republicans tend to dominate, could also affect reapportionment within each state.

“If Congressional and other redistricting was done in this manner, it would mean that regions of states that had fewer immigrants, such as upstate New York, would gain, while those with many immigrants would lose,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census data. “This is going to disempower immigrants massively.”

The Constitution, as amended, requires that Congressional districts be reapportioned on the basis of a count every 10 years of the “whole number of persons” in each state. The 10-question 2010 census form does not ask about citizenship, but the Census Bureau includes that question in other forms, including the 2006-8 American Community Survey released on Tuesday.

Supporters of Mr. Vitter’s proposal say that “inhabitants” [*] should mean only bona fide residents, and that questions were raised in the past about whether to count people in a variety of categories, like Indians and Mormon missionaries stationed abroad.

Opponents argue not only that the census has traditionally included every person, but also that the proposed change would delay the 2010 count and would also discourage immigrants in the country illegally from participating in the census.

The Queens College analysis largely confirmed Mr. Vitter’s assessment of the impact of his proposal on how Congressional seats would be apportioned among the states. His proposal, in the form of an amendment to a spending bill, would ban federal financing for the census if a citizenship question was not included. The proposal has not been put to a test yet in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where its prospects are considered doubtful.

The census’s latest three-year American Community Survey data suggested only incremental changes from the 2008 figures released last month. The percentage of foreign-born people ranged from 0.9 percent in metropolitan Altoona, Pa., to 36.9 percent in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, the survey found.

A separate analysis by William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, found that Dallas and Houston were attracting less-educated migrants and identified large brain drains from Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and, to a lesser extent, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Boston.

Meanwhile, Atlanta; Seattle; Austin, Tex.; San Francisco; and Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., were magnets for better-educated people who were relocating.

Another study, this one by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative-leaning research organization, found that households leaving New York in 2006-7 had average incomes 13 percent higher than those moving in.

But New York City’s Department of City Planning found that people moving to the city in 2005-6 had a higher income, were younger and better educated than those who left.

Copyright 2009 © The New York Times

* from Nate: The word 'inhabitants' does not appear in the Constitution for the purposes of mandating that Congess conduct a census.

Census 2010

from The New York Times

Notice how the U.S. Census Bureau quotes the obsolete phrase of Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution which has been supplanted by the Fourteenth Amendment. We now count "the whole number of persons in each State." - Nate.

Times Topics

Census

Updated: Feb. 20, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

"Representation and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers ... . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."

— Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States (Via the U.S. Census Bureau)

While most Americans do not think much about the census, it looms large in the lives of the nation's political leaders, with the next decennial nose-count due in 2010. The constitutionally mandated "enumeration" determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, and helps to determine where the district lines are drawn within each state. It will also shift billions upon billions of federal dollars over the next decade from some parts of the country to others because of population-driven financing formulas.

The parties have been at loggerheads for years over how to conduct the census. Most everyone agrees that the traditional method - mail-back surveys and door-knocking follow-ups - fails to count millions of Americans. Democrats argue that the solution is to use statistical sampling models to extrapolate figures for the uncounted people. If minorities, immigrants, the poor and the homeless are the most likely to be undercounted, then such sampling would presumably benefit the Democrats.

Republicans, for their part, argue that statistical sampling is unreliable and that the Constitution mandates an actual count. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that under current law, sampling techniques could not be used to reapportion House seats from one state to another. But some experts still believe that it could be used in drawing district lines within the states, and to determine money flows.

Article Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Amendment XII

The 2010 census will change the composition of the Electoral College

Comments by Nate Segal

After the 2010 census, some states may gain representatives in Congress; some may lose. Congressional districts will be redrawn according to population. Each district is supposed to contain roughly the same number of people who live there.

None of this is a surprise when we study the U. S. Constitution and its amendments.

"Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed" (Amendment XIV, Section 2).

Conducting an accurate census is a challenge. Here's an excerpt from an article in the Kansas City Star:

Area cities counting on counts in 2010 Census

By BRAD COOPER and LYNN HORSLEY The Kansas City Star Wednesday, October 14, 2009, page A4

... there is a growing concern nationwide that the next census — an event required every 10 years by the Constitution — will be tougher than any head counts done before.

A new study out this week by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that a number of major cities — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles among them— are struggling to amass the resources they need to get as complete a count as possible.

Most of the cities in the study had less money and fewer staffers to devote to the census than they did 10 years ago. Only five of the 11 cities had committed public funds to the census. Some cities, such as Detroit, are relying on private donations to promote the census.

Census workers traditionally have struggled to count the homeless, minorities and immigrants in large cities, and many expect the 2010 effort to be especially challenging.

Factors increasing that challenge include the swine flu virus, which could isolate certain populations; heightened rhetoric about immigration policy; and general distrust of government.

Residents in Kansas City and Wyandotte County have had some of the worst census response rates in the area.

A little more than a third of the residents in both places didn’t respond to census questionnaires in 2000, forcing workers to make in-person visits to gather the data.

The response rates in some of the area’s more affluent suburbs, such as Overland Park and Lee’s Summit, approached 80 percent, according to Census Bureau statistics.

To reach Brad Cooper, call 816-234-7724 or send e-mail to bcooper@kcstar.com.