I don’t want to discuss here the wisdom of such a move, only its legality. Could a state simply have each party put up a slate of candidates, chosen by primary or otherwise and the party that wins the state simply elects its entire slate? We seem to be tending that way anyway.
I just read the relevant section of the Constitution, which is article 1 section 2.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-2/
Based on my reading, it certainly seems as if choosing members for the House of Representatives in the way you describe would not be unconstitutional. AFAICT the only requirement would be that the state in question would have to pass a law to that effect.
Or, as an alternative, if the Ds get 60% of the vote and the Rs get 40%, that’s the split of the states delegation. (To the nearest whole seat and making appropriate allowances for third, or even fourth, parties.)
It seems to me that I recall a court case striking down proportional representation for congressmembers, but I don’t remember the name. If so, then presumably the same arguments would also apply against winner-takes-all.
I googled proportional representation for congress and the only thing I coulf was about distributing seats among states.
There’s the Reynolds vs. Sims case, from back in the days of the Warren court.
The case struck down having districts of unequal size. A winner take all law could fall under the same principle, since it’s likely that representation would be predominantly from the big cities if the only choice at the polls is R or D. The only way around that I can think of would be if the districts are kept for the primaries but then the general election is just R or D.
I remember that case, but it was based on equal protection of the XIV amendment. My home state of PA hadn’t redistricted its legislatures since 1900 despite a clear requirement in the commonwealth’s constitution. Until this decision, courts had ruled that enforcing the state constitutions was not a judiciable question, but a political one. The trouble was that the small districts had the political power to dominate the large one. There was one district in, I think, VT that had shrunk to 4 voters. But I don’t think that is relevant here.
I think that there is / was a federal law saying that house of reps has to be elected by “districts”, and that “district” has been taken to have the original meaning of geographical area.
So by law (as I remember) you could only have a single-district slate if that federal law is taken to include singular in plural.
My understanding is that the law for the federal house-of-reps has evolved as a federal law.
edit – no no, the districts have to be single member, you can’t have a multi-member single district.
I believe the relevant law that would prevent such a scheme is 2 U.S.C. §2c. It seems to preclude multi-member at-large districts (a state can only elect a congressional rep in a statewide election if the state only has 1 rep, eg: Alaska).
For a discussion of the relevant section of law and other developments, see:
So it would take an act of congress, not a constitutional amendment.
Maybe. I don’t think that follows. You’re correct that current law has stood the test of constitutionality and prohibits at-large districts and member lists. And you’re correct that in theory Congress could change the law to allow something else like you suggest.
But that something else has not been tested against the constitution and may not pass muster. My own bet is it would not, based on the various cases cited upthread.
The one-person one-vote standard is only about the relative populations of districts. If there are no districts, there can be no violation of 1P1V, because all votes are equal. The fear that legislators might be “predominantly from the big cities” is actually what the case you link to was rejecting as a legitimate basis for anything. Earl Warren wrote that “legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”
In the case Wesberry v. Sanders from the same group of cases, the court’s opinion seems to be that at-large multi-member representation is in keeping with the constitutional requirements:
We hold that, construed in its historical context, the command of Art. I, § 2, that Representatives be chosen ‘by the People of the several States’ [9] means that as nearly as is practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s. [10] This rule is followed automatically, of course, when Representatives are chosen as a group on a statewide basis, as was a widespread practice in the first 50 years of our Nation’s history.
The legislation was the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967. One of the main reasons it was passed was that folks were concerned that southern states would switch to at-large districts as a way to avoid electing minority candidates after the Voting Rights Act passed. The Wesberry decision also raised the possibility of courts interfering in districting in a way that Congress would find unacceptable, so they wanted to get out in front of it.
I cannot avoid comparing that situation to the present era, where the power of the Voting Rights Act has been substantially reduced and Congress seems determined to surrender its power to the other branches of government. Time to go shake my fist at some clouds, I guess.