In the news today, two residents of Delaware sued for their state to have a second seat in the US House of Representatives; claiming they are under-represented with just one seat for 991k residents.
Interesting to me, they are not requesting the House to generally grow in size, but only to add an additional seat for Delaware. Is it typical, when challenging the constitutionality of a law, to propose a solution?
I mean, that’s the nature of these things. There’s always going to be some cutoff, which means that there will always be some things just above the cutoff and some things just below it. They’re going to need a better argument than “this state that has more people than us has more representatives”.
I should add that Montana attempted a similar suit in 1992 when they dropped from two reps to one in United States Dep’t of Commerce v. Montana (91-860), 503 U.S. 442 (1992). The main argument was One Person, One Vote, but they lost the case 9-0.
Also, and irrespective of the merits of Delaware’s case, having an even number of Congress critters would make legislative life much more difficult for the leaders of that body, since there is no equivalent of the VP that the Senate has available to break tie votes.
As long as the number of seats is limited, and the population of the country is still growing, Delaware would have to grow faster than the country at large, and some other state would have to grow more slowly than the country, for the number of seats to shift respectively for those two states. They may never get there.
Ohio used to do something like this for its state legislature. If a county was entitled to 1.4 seats in the state House of Representatives, it would get one seat for the whole decade and a second one in two of the five elections that decade. This whole system was thrown out due to the One Person, One Vote cases in the 1960s (because the number of seats was capped such that urban counties were underrepresented).
Obviously a way to improve the borderline cutoff situation that @Chronos wisely noted is inescapable is to increase the size of the House. If we (arbitrarily) double the headcount, plus 1 to preserve an odd number, we’d have 871 reps.
I’m not going to do an actual apportionment on that basis, but decent bet it would produce fewer of these “Teacher teacher, I just missed a B by one measly point!” complaints.
Of course the best “one person one vote” method is repeal that Act entirely, and at each census determine the population of the least populous state, set that as the size of a representative’s constituency, then award each state as many reps as it takes using that unit measure versus their populations. You’ll still have boundary cases, but fewer. And lots less over-representation of the smallish states.
Eh, how common is it for there to be no vacancies in the House, or no members absent for any given vote? In any given vote, it’s going to be essentially random whether the number is even or odd.
Wouldn’t help with this particular problem. You’ll still have some state that has just slightly less than twice the population of the smallest state, and that state would still have the same complaint that Delaware does now. To make a significant difference on the edge-case problem, you’d need to, as you say, increase the size of the House until even the smallest state had at least two reps.
There’s an algorithm to determine number of seats, given a total size for the House. If Delaware thinks that algorithm is unfair, then they need to propose a better one. It’s happened before, when someone noticed that the old algorithm had some real paradoces implicit in it (IIRC, a state increased its percentage of the national population, but lost a representative, from once census to the next).
I don’t really understand the proposed remedy. Why would Delaware get the 436th seat? The state that’s next in line for another seat is New York:
Based on the 2020 census results, New York fell right below Minnesota in the rankings, making it one of the seven states that lost a seat.
But that would not have happened if New York’s count included 89 more residents, a new record for the smallest number of additional residents a state would have needed in their census numbers to pick up the last assigned House seat.
Edit: I played around with an apportionment calculator using the current method, and Delaware’s second seat would be way back at #473 by the 2020 census numbers.
Just to reiterate how weird I find their remedy: 25 other states, i.e. half of the states in the union, have a better claim to more seats than Delaware does (some of them several more seats, e.g. California and Texas would get four more each before Delaware got a second), unless the plaintiffs are also saying that the Huntington-Hill method is unconstitutional and there just so happens to be a constitutionally-superior formula under which Delaware just so happens to be entitled to seat #436.
When the resolution of your unit of measure is one rep for smallest state, the distribution is still real lumpy. If the smallest state is instead guaranteed 2, 3, or 10 reps, the resolution gets finer and the number of cases of large misses between population and rep count is, statistically speaking, going to decline. Which is not to say it’ll never happen.
@Lord_Feldon: Which raises an interesting, although hugely unlikely, situation. Assume the court finds the Permanent Apportionment Act unconstitutional full stop. And appeals either don’t reach SCOTUS or SCOTUS upholds. What now?
It’s an interesting speculative future history. I’m not thinking that’s a can of worms the USA ought to open in this already tumultuous decade. But it could happen.
The problem with an even-numbered House is not in routine voting.
It’s in determining which party is the majority party entitled to the committee chairmanships, the committee majorities, and all the other power perks of being majority.
Yes, so-called “independents” slightly muddy the waters, but that’s why they are essentially forced to choose a side to caucus with.
In a hypothetical system with 3 or more parties of roughly co-equal size, the even/oddness of the total headcount would matter less. But given our real world party duopoly, an odd total is a very important feature.
True, excellent point. There’s no constitutional mechanism to decide a majority party like the Senate has. Maybe have the 2 candidates fight it out, Kal-if-fee style.
A few years ago, I saw something, perhaps an OpEd essay, advocating for a massive increase in the number of members of the United States House of Representatives. The author suggested that the House members could better represent a smaller group of constituents. FYI, until 1813, each member represented fewer than 35,000 people, while currently it’s about 761,169 per House member. The House of Representatives would have to be about twenty times as large as it is currently if representation was the same as early in the country’s history.
AIUI, their main argument is that the frame’s intention was for the size of the House of Reps to grow based on the 10-year census and that the districts were intended to be much smaller (the minimum size was reduced from 40k to 30k). Since the size of the House has been fixed at 435, it has led to an increasing disparity of representation.
It’s a quantization problem. You can reduce the error by increasing the number of reps. The question becomes “What is an acceptable level of error?”.
Montana was given as an extreme example: 10% greater population, 100% more reps. Obviously this changes with each census as Montana was making the same point three decades ago.
I don’t understand why there is a proposed remedy at all. Is it a necessary or typical part of a constitutional challenge?
FWIW, what the suit asks is for the three judge panel to give Congress a fixed amount of time to remedy the situation. If that time expires without a solution, then give Delaware another seat.
So the remedy isn’t to give Delaware a seat as the news article said, but to encourage Congress to act.
Why does every Rep’s vote in Congress have to count the same?
Couldn’t you just say every X citizens is entitled to one representative, run the algorithm, and if you end up with a case like Delaware where their districts are 1.8x more populous than the “standard” district then their reps get 1.8x the voting power. Sure there is math involved, but we do have computers these days…
I also like the idea of tripling the House, but only having one third of them actual resident in Washington each 2 years. The others would attend committee meetings virtually. Or you could have shared office space and reps could rotate who was in their home state doing constituency services and who was in DC every few months. Voting could either be done remotely or via proxy (each Rep could formally declare a proxy whenever they expected to not be in DC).
I believe this is all negotiated and voted on after the new Speaker is elected. There have been cases where the party with a plurality wasn’t the majority party. For example: 65th United States Congress.