Answer to redistricting: Enlarge Congress

Townhall.com ^ | 12-19-03 | Jonah Goldberg

[FairWitness]

Last week, when everyone who understands the First Amendment was rightly having conniptions over the Supreme Court's ruling that political speech can be severely regulated under the rubric of "campaign finance reform," the court also heard arguments in a major redistricting case brought by Pennsylvania Democrats. They're upset because they have a statewide advantage of some 445,000 votes but Democrats hold only seven of the state's 19 congressional seats. Their claim: Congressional districts are being drawn unfairly.

Truth be told, I don't particularly care much about the details of this case. The Democrats complain that the Republicans redrew the map so as to eliminate three Democratic seats. The Republicans say, you guys did it to us for decades, it's your turn to suck eggs.

OK, I may not be capturing the legal subtleties as well some scholars might. But the point is, it was ever thus. Gerrymandering - drawing districts for partisan advantage - is neither unconstitutional nor new. Indeed, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the only districts that violate constitutional principles are the ones excessively and explicitly gerrymandered along racial lines - you know, like the North Carolina district that snaked along Interstate 85 looking something like an X-ray of a colonoscopy.

Yes, I think Republicans in Texas and Colorado probably went too far when they decided to redraw congressional districts after the once-a-decade window was closed. And, maybe the Pennsylvania GOP has gone too far, though it doesn't seem like it to me.

But, look: It is simply inevitable that politicians will fight to draw congressional districts in the most advantageous way possible. Expecting them not to is like expecting Yogi Bear to abstain from eating picnic baskets for the sake of improving tourism.

I have the solution: Make Congress bigger. A lot bigger.

With 435 members, the U.S. Congress is one of the smallest representative bodies in the world. By "smallest" I mean literally and relatively. The British House of Commons is much bigger (659) and so is the British House of Lords (approx. 500). The French National Assembly (577 members) is bigger, as is the Mexican Chamber of Deputies (500), the Russian Duma (450) and so on. But, it's not just in absolute terms. Due to their smaller populations, these countries have fewer citizens for each representative, making them far more democratic.

The founding fathers wanted the U.S. Congress to grow with the population - and it did until 1920 when it froze at 435, largely as a failed effort to limit immigrant political influence. The only time George Washington chimed in during the constitutional convention was to implore his colleagues to reduce the size of congressional districts to 30,000 from a proposed 40,000. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison defended the size of these districts from numerous critics who considered them too large! Such mammoth districts, the critics believed, would amount to a tyranny.

Today the average congressional district has about 600,000 people in it (single-district Montana has closer to 1 million). By comparison, in 1790, half of the 16 U.S. states didn't have a combined population of 600,000. By today's standards, the 1790 House of Representatives would have had seven members and the Senate 24.

All of the ideas for fixing congressional districting call for more and more undemocratic intrusions into the process, particularly by unelected federal judges. Liberals and sympathetic judges want more minority representation. Fine. Most of us want representatives to reflect the values of their communities. That's fine too. Lots of people want "big money" gone from congressional elections. Also fine.

Expanding Congress might solve all of these supposed problems. A bigger Congress would be far more open to blacks, Hispanics, et al, for obvious reasons. Because fewer people would be electing them, representatives would have every reason to spend more time talking to a bigger share of their communities. And as for the influence of money, money would become less important in districts where TV ad spending was less of a prerequisite. And if you're worried about pork-barrel spending, there's every reason to believe it would be harder to get pet projects through a bigger Congress.

I don't know if we should have districts of 30,000 these days. That would create a Congress of more than 8,000 representatives. But a couple thousand wouldn't be a bad way to start.

Yes, there'd be a seating problem in Congress. But those guys are never all there to begin with and the British Parliament has had a standing-room only section for years. All of the voting is computerized, so that's not an obstacle.

The only thing keeping this from happening is that Congress gets to decide. And there's no reason to expect those guys to divvy up their own picnic baskets.

Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

[blanknoone]

That would surely give the "red" states more clout

Not really true. I think increasing the number of reps would make congress ever so slightly more responsive. But it is not a fix for gerrymandering...small districts can be gerrymandered even more easily and less conspicuously.

However, in terms of power, it would actually diminish republican power...at the very least at the electoral college. Small states with one rep get 3 electoral college votes (1 rep, 2 Senate). This small state advantage currently heavily favors Republicans. Increasing the # of reps would reduce this advantage in Presidential contests...which of course also affects the judicial branch.

[Mr. Bird]

I think the concept is sound. Unfortunately, our federal government is now a behemoth that dabbles in nearly every aspect of American life. Introducing more dabblers would likely worsen the problem.

If we could roll back the extra-constitutional meddling and stick to the original premise, a higher number of reps would be outstanding.

[Hessian]

Heck maybe they should reduce today's number by 1/2 and limit the session days to 180 days.... let them spend some time in their districts with their constituents.....

And CUT THEIR PAY! Turn the Watergate into a Congreesional dorm if you have to - but you shouldn't get rich serving the people.

[Xthe17th]

Instead of using the arbitrary 600,000 figure, if we simply divide the population of the least populous state (currently Wyoming) into the populations of every other state (and round up or down accordingly), we'd find ourselves with an additional 35 seats in the House of Representatives; Not an unreasonable increase with just about every state gaining one more representative. Also, if you analyze this wrt electoral votes, Bush would still have won 2000 by a narrow margin, so it doesn't favor either major party:

STATE__2000 Census____New #Reps
WY......493,782..........1
DC......572,059..........1
VT......608,827..........1
AK......626,932..........1
ND......642,200..........1
SD......754,844..........2
DE......783,600..........2
MT......902,195..........2
RI......1,048,319........2
HI......1,211,537........2
NH......1,235,786........3
ME......1,274,923........3
ID......1,293,953........3
NE......1,711,263........3
WV......1,808,344........4
NM......1,819,046........4
NV......1,998,257........4
UT......2,233,169........5
AR......2,673,400........5
KS......2,688,418........5
MS......2,844,658........6
IA......2,926,324........6
CT......3,405,565........7
OR......3,421,399........7
OK......3,450,654........7
SC......4,012,012........8
KY......4,041,769........8
CO......4,301,261........9
AL......4,447,100........9
LA......4,468,976........9
MN......4,919,479.......10
AZ......5,130,632.......10
MD......5,296,486.......11
WI......5,363,675.......11
MO......5,595,211.......11
TN......5,689,283.......12
WA......5,894,121.......12
IN......6,080,485.......12
MA......6,349,097.......13
VA......7,078,515.......14
NC......8,049,313.......16
GA......8,186,453.......17
NJ......8,414,350.......17
MI......9,938,444.......20
OH......11,353,140......23
PA......12,281,054......25
IL......12,419,293......25
FL......15,982,378......32
NY......18,976,457......38
TX......20,851,820......42
CA......33,871,648......69
TOTALS: 286,718,392.....570

PS: Get the same result if DC is combined with Maryland (DC-->0, MD-->12) as it should be per retrocession!

[Xthe17th]

...ooops, my bad... 570 = an additional 135 seats!

[metesky]

best way is to have unwritten constitution

Your @$$ is sucking geval water.

[Right Wing Professor]

What everyone is missing is that the US is a Federal system, far more so than most of the countries listed. Most of the functions held by the central government in other countries are carried out by the states in the US.

[Right Wing Professor]

best way is to have unwritten constitution

We pretty much have an unwritten Constitution, since most of the judges in SCOTUS ignore the written one and legislate based on their 'feelings'.

[only1percent]

Some small-state Senators would be sure to resist this, as if they didn't gain a Rep from the scheme it would dilute the electoral vote advantage their state enjoys, and if they did gain a Rep from the scheme it would materially increase the Senators' pool of potential opponents.

However, the Senate as a whole might find an expansion of the House quite gratifying. Since, to be politically paletable, an expansion of the House would almost certainly be accompanied by a pro-rata reduction of individual House office budgets, the relative institutional power of an individual Senator, already monumental compared to that of any non-leadership House member, would increase even more.

[jwalsh07]

What everyone is missing is that the US is a Federal system, far more so than most of the countries listed. Most of the functions held by the central government in other countries are carried out by the states in the US.

Good point, I was just getting ready to throw that two cents in when lo and behold, there you were.

[FairWitness]

Some small-state Senators would be sure to resist this, as if they didn't gain a Rep from the scheme it would dilute the electoral vote advantage their state enjoys, - - - "

However, the Senate as a whole might find an expansion of the House quite gratifying. Since, - - - the relative institutional power of an individual Senator, already monumental compared to that of any non-leadership House member, would increase even more.

Yes, the Senate is a problem in more than a couple of ways. If Senators really represented their own state, as originally intended, instead of seeing themselves as "presidents in training", things would be far less screwed up (and campaign finance reform would probably be a non-issue).

[mvpel]

If a representative has to answer to a few tens of thousands of individuals, rather than hundreds of thousands, it seems like that would make it easier for these smaller communities to keep tabs on and hold their representatives accountable.

[djreece]

It's about time this issue is discussed! It's the constitutional thing to do, and I believe freezing the size of Congress was one of the changes that led to the federal government's explosive growth in size and power in the last century.

Having more members of Congress would help address the problems of corruption and campaign finance. The grassroots candidates would be able to compete by going out and meeting voters face to face; thus the incumbents would have to become more responsive to their constituents. By having a larger Congress, we may be able to pare their outrageous salaries and perks to a more reasonable level and maybe even cut down on the amount of time Congress stays in session.

[djreece]

So if my math and understanding of their formula is correct, the Founding Fathers would have wanted us today to have 1,558 Congressional representatives, each representing 180,000 people.

[AuH2ORepublican]

I like your idea. We could amend the Constitution so that the population of the smallest state be the base to determine how many districts each state should have, and the number of Reps can increase as the population grows. Since the number of Reps per state would be measured by dividing their population by the pop of the least populous state (and rounding up if it's .50 or above and down if it's below .50), reapportionment would no longer be a zero-sum game where the only way in which Utah can gain a seat is if it is denied to North Carolina. I think we could tie this to an idea of mine, which is to give each state 3 Senators, so that there's a Senate election in every state every two years (thus giving the people the chance to affect their Senate representation in every election). The original Congress (after RI ratified the Constitution) had 65 Representatives and 26 Senators, a ratio of 2.5 Reps per Senator. The ratio today is 4.35 Reps per Senators, which means that small states are much less represented in the Electoral College than they used to be. While 2.5:1 ratio in a House of 570 members would result in 228 Senators, which obviously wouldn't work, having 150 Senators would yield a 3.8:1 ratio, which is a lot fairer.

But even if we had 570 congressional districts, it would not curb gerrymandering---in fact, I think it would make it worse, since it would give redistricters more "cloth" with which to work. There is no perfect solution to political gerrymandering. In fact, it would be less (small d) democratic to draw districts without taking politics into account, because one would end up with districts were the people have nothing in common except the fact that they live in a 20-mile radius of each other. And if one tries to draw as many evenly-matched districts as possible, a party that has a good election night could elect every member of the delegation even though they are only 51% of the population. If one tries to be fair about how to go about electing representatives, one has to balance (i) the right of the majority to speak with one voice with (ii) the right of a numerous minority to representation. Thus, it would be wrong to insist that 4 of the 9 representatives from Indiana be Democrats even though they get 44% of the vote, since the 56% that vote Republican should expect, for the most part, to speak for Indiana in Congress. But it is also wrong for all 10 reps from Massachusetts to be Democrats. I believe the best way to reach the happy medium between strict majoritarianism and strict proportional representation is for each state to create a number of multi-member districts (3-member or 5-member districts are best), with each multi-member district electing members by proportional representation. Thus, Indiana would create 3 districts of 3 members each, and each of the districts would most likely elect 2 Republicans and 1 Democrat, for a congressional delegation of 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Massachusetts would create 2 districts of 5 members each, with the most likely result being a delegation with 6 or 7 Democrats and 3 or 4 Republicans. The benefits of such a system are that not only will minority ideologies get representation (when was the last time a Republican from SW Georgia or NW Tennessee had a representative who looked out for his interests?), but it would make it much more difficult to obtain partisan advantage from redistricting, since multi-member districts are almost impossible to pack, stack or crack. And there would be no need to draw "minority-majority" districts, since any 3-member district in which blacks are over 25% of the population and any 5-member district in which they are over 17% of the population would be able to elect a black Congressman. I think multi-member districts may be the only way to avoid most of the problems created by redistricting in particular and congressional elections generally.

[metesky]

That's not what I get. 300,000,000 citizens, divided by 50,000 per district gives us 6000 reps.

Think of how much easier it would be to send a disagreeable rep home. Think of lobbyists having to buy 3001 votes.

Next up: repeal the 17th Amendment.

[Political Junkie Too]

I wonder if there is an Equal Protection argument here.

Setting aside the people per representative at the national level, what is the proportion on a state by state basis? Do the single-district states like North/South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Vermont, and Wyoming, have the same ratio as the larger states like New York, Florida, Texas, and California?

Can people argue that their ability to be represented in a large state is not the same as a person's ability from a smaller state?

-PJ

[Looking for Diogenes]

In Los Angeles County, the five Supervisors each represent districts with about 2 million persons. And that is suppose to be local government.

[Political Junkie Too]

I didn't see your chart when I posted #35. When I get a chance, I'll look at the ratio on a state-by-state basis to see if one can make an Equal Protection argument that some states' citizens have better representation (on a per person basis) than other states.

No taxation with unequal representation?

-PJ