I find it appropriate that on Constitution Day (“happy” 222nd) there is a story about a lawsuit seeking to expand the House in the name of fairness for voters across the nation. Of course, I am in favor of expanding the House but let’s look at this lawsuit summed up in two paragraphs:
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.
The disparity between the size of various House districts, not to mention the sheer size of all the House districts, is a great reason to expand the House. I hope that the plaintiffs win this lawsuit and get the House expanded. Once that happens it might loosen the door to get a Constitutional Amendment passed specifying that Congress can regulate the ratio of voters to Representatives, but not the absolute number of House Representatives directly.
Let’s look at what that would mean. I’ll use the examples from the paragraphs cited above and show the extremes by using a maximum district size much higher than I would prefer – one that would have the house size of about 650 representatives – I’ll use 500,000 as the maximum number of people that a Congressman could represent. The way things would work is that Congress specifies that no district can have more than 500,000 people and allocates enough representatives per state to make that possible. In that case, Montana would have two representatives each serving approximately 479,000. Nevada would have 6 representatives each serving around 450,000. By contrast Wyoming would have 2 representatives each serving 262,000. That’s still virtually half the size of the largest districts but Rhode Island would only have 3 districts serving 353,000 each which is much closer to the largest districts.
So long as the maximum district size barely gives a second seat to the smallest state we would have nearly a 2:1 ratio between the largest and smallest districts, but if the ceiling were set lower – say 250,000 it would be even closer. Wyomings 3 districts would serve 175,000 each while Nevada’s 12 would serve only 240,000 and Montana’s 4 would serve 239,000. The point is that there would be much more parity between districts in various states and each representative would be much better able to know and serve their constituents in the now-smaller districts.
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