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The Constitution created the House of Representatives with 65 members, each representing no more than 30,000 people. Today, the House has 435 members, and their districts average about 710,000 constituents, according to the 2010 census.
That average conceals a wide variation from one state to another. Delaware's only congressman, freshman Democrat John Carney, represents about 900,000 people. In Wyoming, the state's only member of Congress, two-term Republican Cynthia Lummis, represents about 563,000 people.
“One person, one vote” requires congressional districts to be equal in population within each state so that each person is equally represented in government. But the constitutional provision allotting one seat to each state combines with the need to round some fractions up and others down to make mathematical equality impossible from state to state.
Plaintiffs from five of the states disadvantaged in House seats under the 2000 census — Delaware, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota and Utah — filed suit in federal court in Mississippi to challenge the disparities as a violation of their rights to equal representation in Congress. At the time, Montana had more than 900,000 people, just below the threshold then needed for a second House seat.
“We believe that it's pretty clear that this is not equal and it's not as equal as practicable,” says Michael Farris, a constitutional lawyer in Northern Virginia and well-known conservative activist. Farris, a home-schooling advocate, recruited the plaintiffs for the case after being approached by another home-schooling father in the area.
In defending the suit, the government argued that complete elimination of the interstate disparities would require “an astronomical increase” in the size of the House. The number of House seats has been fixed since 1911 except for temporary increases to accommodate new states: Arizona and New Mexico in 1912, Alaska and Hawaii in the late 1950s.
Farris countered that an increase of as few as 10 seats would have reduced state disparities by half. And he noted that the British House of Commons has more than 500 members for a country with 62 million residents — one-fifth of the U.S. population of 308 million.
The government also contended that the suit raised a “political question” that, in effect, was none of the federal courts' business. Ruling last summer, the three-judge district court hearing the case held that the plaintiffs had no right to equal representation in the House. “We see no reason to believe that the Constitution as originally understood or long applied imposes the requirements of close equality among districts in different States that the Plaintiffs seek here,” the court wrote in the July 8 ruling.
On appeal, the Supreme Court rejected the suit even more firmly by setting aside the district court's ruling with instructions to dismiss the case altogether. The court gave no explanation, but Farris says he assumed the justices decided the case on political-question grounds.
Farris is not the only advocate for increasing the size of the House. In an op-ed essay in The New York Times, two professors argued that a significantly larger House would allow representatives to be closer to their constituents, reduce the cost of campaigns and limit the influence of lobbyists and special interests. “It's been far too long since the House expanded to keep up with population growth,” New York University sociologist Dalton Conley and Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens wrote. As a result, Conley and Stevens contended, the House “has lost touch with the public and been overtaken by special interests.”
Farris also believes a larger House would be politically more responsive — and, in his view, more conservative. “Bigger districts create more liberal legislators,” he says. “The more it costs to campaign, the more beholden you are to people who want something from government.”
Farris also warns that the disparities in the size of districts will increase over time. But he acknowledges that another court challenge may meet the same fate as his and that House members are unlikely to vote, in effect, to reduce their power by increasing the body's size. “The foxes have been given complete control of the henhouse,” he says.
In the meantime, however, one of the states with the greatest underrepresentation under the 2000 apportionment — Utah — will be picking up a seat in the 2012 election. Under the new apportionment, Utah's four representatives will have about 692,000 constituents each, slightly below the national average. Delaware, Montana and South Dakota each remains well above the average district size, while Mississippi's four districts have about 744,000 people each, only slightly above the national average.
— Kenneth Jost
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