On July 8, a 3-judge U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Mississippi ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not require a larger number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives. Clemons v U.S. Department of Commerce, 3:09-cv-104. The decision is 36 pages long.
Plaintiffs had based on their argument on the need to have approximately equal representation in the U.S. House. Given that the size of the House is 435 members, and given that the Constitution implicitly seems to bar creating U.S. House districts that include parts of one state and parts of another state, the existing system provides great inequality between states. Wyoming has one seat for 495,304 persons, but Montana has one seat for 905,316 persons. Therefore, an individual voter in Wyoming has more than twice the voting power of a voter in Montana, for U.S. House representation.
The decision says that the Constitution was almost amended in the 1790’s to provide for an ever-increasing size in the U.S. House. The proposed amendment to require that Congress constantly increase the size of the U.S. House passed in Congress and would have become part of the Constitution if one more state had ratified it. In effect, the recent decision says that the courts should not impose an idea that might have become part of the text of the Constitution itself, but did not become part of the Constitution. Thanks to Michael Warnken for the news. The case will almost certainly be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
One more New Age MORON case.
The nearly dead U.S.A. Const.–
Art. I, Sec. 2, para. 3 — Min 1 seat per State.
435-50 = 385
14 Amdt, Sec. 2 — apportion among States.
ANTI-Democracy gerrymanders in All States — Each State is a gerrymander district by itself.
ALWAYS 2 extreme high/low States.
ALL the court stuff is a total waste of time and money.
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Const Amdt
Uniform definition of Elector.
P.R. and App.V.
1 –
Are you the guy who played Gabby in “Blazing Saddles?”
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Ah, yes, the real first amendment. No, honestly, it was listed first among the twelve passed as the Bill of Rights. (The long-delayed and instantly-gutted 27th was the other one.)
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Ah, yes, the one which read – “…nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons.”
Shall we build a new Capitol building to house the “not more than” 6,160 representatives for our population of 308 million?
Here’s a solution that I think will work. Take the state with the lowest population and use that as a baseline of one representative. I believe that would currently be Wyoming with just over 500,000.
Now divide Wyoming’s population into the populations of the other 49 states, and round any number over x.5 up to the nearest x+1 whole number, and any number x.5 or less down to the x whole number. Wyoming would be 532k/532k = 1 representative.
You’ll find that this only increases the size of the House of Reps to a little over 600 persons. It’s feasible and makes sense, IMHO.
I presume the aforementioned amendment had an expiration period/clause?
I think it would be a good idea to verify if the amendment had an expiration/time limit clause. I would almost bet that it doesn’t.
If that’s the case, then it would be a great idea to have a list of the states that ratified it and calculate how many states are needed based on 50 states.
After that,we could begin a lobbying effort with enough states, starting with the smaller ones (they would have a lot to gain) and get it ratified, just like it happened with the 27th amendment (the one that deals with congressional pay raises).
And with all due respect to demo rep, you are obsessed with the idea that the states are in themselves a gerrymander. That is incorrect. The states are the ones who created the federal government and the federal constitution. Gerrymandering is something that happens within many individual states that have many representatives. A horrible example was California in the 1982 reapportionment. Others could say the same about Texas after the 2004 election. While others could say the same about what was done in the 1990 reapportionment round to increase the number of districts in which African-Americans were a majority. I’ll leave it up to every one of you individually to reach their own conclusions.
#7 There is no expiration. The 1st Congress in 1789 proposed 12 Amendments, and invited the States to ratify all, some, or none of them. Some States ratified all of them. Others ratified all of them, but listed them (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12). Others ratified all but a couple. The 3rd through 12th articles of amendment were ratified by 1791, and are now known as the 1st through 10th Amendments (the Bill of Rights). The others were forgotten.
When the sesquicentennial of the Bill of Rights was coming up in 1939, some States like Massachusetts discovered they had never ratified the Bill of Rights, and ratified them. This caused some exploration of what had happened to the other two amendments. The 2nd dealt with congressional pay, and so seemed timely, and legislatures were encouraged to ratify it. It eventually (in 1992) was ratified by 3/4 of the States. No one in Congress wanted to risk challenging ratification and so it became the 27th Amendment. This establishes the precedent that there is no time limit on ratification (if there was no limitation when the amendment was proposed).
The 1st of the original 12 remains pending, but it would have little practical effect. It would reduce the current maximum size of the House of Representative from about 10,000 to about 6,000.
There have been other Amendments proposed by Congress with open-end ratification, but none are likely to be ratified.
#4 Madison originally proposed the Amendments in a different format. The apportionment language was introduced as:
“Secondly. That in article 1st, section 2, clause 3, these words to be struck out, to wit: ‘The number of Representatives …’ and so on.
Had his format been accepted the Constitution would have been amended in line, instead of added separately at the end. All the changes related to the Presidency would have been made in the Article II, etc.
While being considered by Congress, the proposed Amendments were organized more in the form that we are familiar with, but the order they were presented was based on the order they would modify the original Constitution. Since the apportionment amendment would have modified Article I, Section 2, it ended up being first.
The proposed apportionment amendment was one of 12 proposed by Congress in 1789. The 3rd through 12th were ratified by sufficient States by 1791, and are now known as the 1st through 10th Amendments (Bill of Rights). The second was ratified in 1992 (sic) and is now known as the 27th Amendment. The 1st is still pending.
It’s “practical” effect would be to reduce the maximum constitutional size of the House from around 10,000 to 6,000 representatives.
The opinion was in error about the number of States that had ratified it. Neither Pennsylvania nor Delaware ratified it, and 4 States did not ratify any of the Amendments until much later, so only 8 of 14 ratified it. Ironically, the amendment that is now the 27th Amendment was only ratified by 6 of 14 States in the same time period.
I think the opinion erroneously assumes that the 2nd Congress was acting on principle when it did the first post-census apportionment. It so happened that Virginia had just a very small population beyond an even multiple of 30,000. They were quite content to divide by 30,000 and drop any fraction since they practically had no fraction.
#6 The size of the House would vary quite a bit. Wyoming in 2000 had a relatively large share of the population, compared to say Alaska in 1960 or Nevada in the early 1900s. So you might have the size of the House declining in 2010 if Wyoming grows faster than the national average.
And it might not really change things very much. If Montana had two representatives, then each district would represent much fewer people than the one district in South Dakota. The lawsuit argued that 1761 was reasonable because that is where the variation between the largest and smallest district would be less than 10%.
But that is somewhat anomalous due to a curious distribution of small state populations. If the same rule were applied now, it might require 2700 representatives to reach the same equity. That is probably why the lawsuit didn’t actually suggest a remedy, because they realized how flawed setting the House to an arbitrary number of 1761 or a 10% rule.
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Are you suggesting that after the 1990 census there was an interstate conspiracy to increase the number of CD’s in which there would be an African-American majority?
I’d rather not reach my own conclusion. Help me.
#13 — What I was saying is that there was an unofficial agreement between a political party’s national committee to provide assistance to groups interested in increasing African-American representation in Congress. They provided data and other assistance to groups so they would be able to lobby to gain additional representation.
In 1994 that party gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.
The Republican party national committee worked to create more CD’s with African-American majorities?
Is that your thesis?
The House of Reps has been a mob scene since 1873 — due to the 13th-14th-15th Amdts.
Uniform definiton of Elector in ALL of the U.S.A.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner — in ALL legislative bodies.
Really high tech math.
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Count the election related Amdts —
12
14
15
17
19
20
22
23
24
26
27
A mere 11 of 17 after the original 10 — 27 delayed a bit from 1789 to 1992 — or 10 of 16 = 62.5 percent.
Each amendment was supposed to be an added ARTICLE — see the 1789 preamble proposing the original additional 12 — i.e. one more perversion of the regime since 1791.
# 8 ALL of the States created during and after the Civil War were gerrymander States — created mainly by Elephants trying to have a *permanent* Elephant majority in the gerrymander U.S.A. Senate.
Total Votes (by human voters) / Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner = REAL Democracy
— NOT the EVIL minority rule gerrymander stuff in the U.S.A. and State gerrymander regimes — that has produced the near bankruptcy of Western Civilization and set the stage for super-Civil WAR II between ghetto older cities versus outer suburbs and rural areas.
In order to understand the principal problems that result from oversized congressional districts, and how we can return political power to the citizenry through representational enlargement, please read “Taking Back Our Republic”, which can be downloaded from this link: http://www.Thirty-Thousand.org/documents/TTO_Pamphlet.pdf This pamphlet also provides a considerable amount of new and compelling information regarding the consequences of failing to maintain a truly representative democracy as envisioned by our nation’s Founders.