Legal News

Does Congress Need More Members? A Lawsuit Says Yes. Lots More

By Ashby Jones

On first blush, it strikes us as a wildly ambitious stunt: to challenge the constitutionality of the structure of the House of Representatives through a lawsuit. But this is America, land of the wild challenge, the big dreamin’ lawsuit, the constitutional challenge. Without ‘em, frankly, we’d hardly have any need for Law Blogs.

Here’s the deal: On Thursday, a group called Apportionment.us filed suit in federal district court for the Northern District of Mississippi on behalf of five people, one resident from each of the following states: Montana, Delaware, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah. The quintet’s complaint: that their votes carry far less weight in the House of Representatives than do those from residents of other sates, like Rhode Island and Iowa.

The group alleges this is the case because the population variance between the most under-represented congressional district in the nation and most over-represented district exceeds 80%. For example, according to the complaint, Montana has one representative for every approximately 905,000 people while its neighbor to the south, Wyoming, has one representative for approximately every 495,000 people. (The suit deals only with the House, not the Senate where, of course, residents of Montana have far more representation, per capita, than do residents of nearly every other state.)

The group’s demand: that the House of Representatives be ordered to add to its current roster of 435 members. Click here for the complaint; here for the press release from Apportionment.us; here for a story from the NYT.

"When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities," said Scott Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has organized the court challenge, to the NYT. "As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters' voting power is substantially smaller than others'?"

The Times’s Peter Baker explains, however, that inequity is built into system. He writes: Because “each state gets at least one seat, no matter how small its population, and because the overall size of the House has not changed in a century, the number of people represented by a single congressman can vary widely.”

Baker provides nice historical context. The Constitution doesn’t say there need be 435 House members, only that each state need have one and that no district shall represent fewer than 30,000 people. The House reached its current size in 1911, when each member at that time representing an average of 212,000 people. It hasn’t adjusted since.

The pair behind the legal challenge, Scharpen and Michael Farris, a prominent conservative constitutional lawyer, note that some foreign parliaments are significantly larger than the House. And were there more representatives serving smaller districts, they argue, each could be more attentive to fewer constituents.

"It'll be better government," Farris said. "The proportional size of our government is not consistent with other western democracies."

That said, not everyone’s thrilled about the idea of a 1000-member governing body, which is in line with what the plaintiffs suggest. Says Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census director who now teaches at Columbia University: “You may create a more equitable system that's less governable, and I'm not sure the country comes out ahead.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 18, 2009 (boomark / email).