Montana's 1990 Congressional Reapportionment, "One Person, One Vote," and the Samuel Alito Confirmation Hearings
Well, here we are, at long last the confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito, the nominee for the US Supreme Court. I haven't been watching them from beginning to end, but the parts of it that I have seen are "good TV"--a combination of intelligent questioning of the nominee, bombastic and long-winded "questioning" by egomaniacs who believe that their ideas and opinions are the centers of attention in these hearings and not those of the nominee, and some good old-fashioned childish behavior on the part of grown adults who somehow have gotten to be US Senators. Generally seems to be going well for the nominee, with those who are obviously opposed to his nomination having shifted tactics from any sort of direct questioning of him or his legal positions to the idea that they could Bork him on his past membership in a group called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP).
That last matter had been predicted before the hearings began, namely, that those who couldn't "Bork" him on his legal credentials might go after that CAP issue. I could easily comment on that issue as that organization was very active on campus during the years when I attended that university, but really, the positions that CAP took--and the tone that they used to present them--really deserve their own full and complete telling in their own right, and not merely as an undercard for these Alito hearings. Suffice it to say that they might remind a contemporary conservative talk-radio junkie of Michael Savage--someone whose opinions you might agree with, but who is so offensive and so obnoxious that you wonder whether or not he's a plant for the other side, an agent provocateur designed to cause problems from within. CAP was that obnoxious.
So, the one issue that was predicted to come up in the attempted Borking of Samuel Alito seems to have both come forth, and seems to be going nowhere. Let me then turn my attention to another issue that was predicted to possibly arise,w hich so far hasn't ut which still might AND which actually has jurisprudential significance--the issue of redistricting, specifically "one person, one vote." For those of you who don't know what that is, it basically is a US Supreme Court decision which requires that, consistent with "equal protection under the law," when district lines are drawn for elected representative bodies like state legislatures, city councils, etc., that those districts have roughly equal populations. That is to prevent a state legislature with, say 80 Legislators, from having some of its districts with 30,000 people living in them and others with 74,000--if every legislator gets one and only one vote, it's easy to see that the people in the district with 30k people have a much greater per capita voice in the State House than the people in the district with 74k people. Easy enough--and fair enough.
I am unfamiliar with the cases that came before the US Supreme Court that generated this standard, but I believe that they are from the 1960s, and involved seats where rural areas in certain (southern?) states had (significantly) greater per capita representation in their state legislatures than did urban areas, and there was some element of skin color involved too, in that by and large black citizens had, in effect, less per capita representation than white citizens did. Fair enough, and it's good that we now have that "one person, one vote" standard to guide us...although, in fairness to our country, our situation NEVER got SO BAD as the British situation, where House Of Commons seats drawn many centuries ago ended up in some cases by the 20th century as having zero (zero!) inhabitants!!!!!! Admittedly it seems that way sometimes, when one looks at some members of the US Hosue and US Senate, as "NO ONE" could possibly have voted for them and therefore they must represent an area where "NO ONE" lives, but in fact that is not the case, they all (scary thought!!!) come from some place where someone, somewhere actually voted for them.
No, the case at hand in the Alito hearings is not the fairness of the "one person, one vote" standard, nor its existence, but rather its applicability. The application of the standard, the notion that every apportioned representative should represent roughly the same number of people, has been taken so far, and to such ridiculous lengths, that it has degenerated into arithmetic absurdity and resulted in the creation of district lines that when viewed on a map are so ridiculous that they look like the chicken scratch of a blindfolded toddler. In other words, with the exact population figures available to state legislatures and those other entities charged with the drawing of district lines which are provided to them every ten years by the "actual enumeration" known as the US Census, especially empowered with the numerical and graphical power of even commercially-available computers in the last 20 or so years, district lines have been drawn so ridiculously and so much with a singleminded adherence to "one person one vote" that in many cases they bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to any sort of natural or pre-existing political, social, or geographical real-world boundaries. That is to say, the district lines for seats like US Congress, state representative or state legislature, city council etc., in many cases end up willy-nilly crossing rivers, township boundaries, county or school district boundaries, dividing communities down the middle of roads or even residential streets, and otherwise making no sense whatsoever, all for the purpose of making sure that at one point in the past they contained almost-exactly-equal numbers of people on the date of April 1st in a year ending in zero when the US Census is considered to be taken. This level of ridiculousness is not *necessarily* mandated by the US Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" requirement, but so many states and localities live in fear of a federal civil rights suit--and don't want to incur the expenses involved in litigation if they are on the receiving end of one--that in effect, district lines are regularly drawn with regard to no other factor than the "mathematical equivalence" standard (and the skin-color demographics of the citizens so involved, which was also a factor in the original US Supreme Court case).
So this standard, good as it is, has been applied to an absurd degree. NOW WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MONTANA AND ITS US CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION!!!!????!?!?!?!!
Well, like many other things in life, there's a link that's not immediately apparent. See, the US House of Representatives is one of those legislative bodies which apportions it representatives based on population. That is, in fact, the official reason why the US Census is conducted every ten years. A total tally is taken of the population of the country as a whole, and of each state in particular, and each state gets to send to Congress a number of representatives "proportional" to its population. (The US Senate, of course, is different--two Senators from every state).
Simple as that notion of Proportionality" might seem, it is in fact actually very difficult to balance. If there were 14 total seats to assign to three bodies of 5,000 people each, each body should get 4 2/3 seats--how would that work??!?!?!? One way of doing so is to "tinker" with the seats--in the above case it would be easy to make 15 total seats, and each body gets 5 reps. For a while the US House did just that, but even then it wasn't easy--the very first veto ever cast by a US President was when George Washington vetoed the first Congressional reapportionment plan after the 1790 Census. Still, it's doable--if you're willing to tinker with the total number of seats.
Starting in 1913, the US House wasn't willing to tinker anymore--it set the total size of the US House at 435 members. The problem with that was that the formula they were then using to assign seats to each state, the "Vinton" or Hamilton" method, created what was hypothetically called the "Alabama Paradox," where one state (in this case, Alabama) could theoretically be the only state in the Union to GAIN population, where every other state in the Union LOSES population...and yet Alabama would still lose seats in the US House!!!! (This did not actually happen, but was discussed as a possibility in a 1920(?) article in the Harvard Law Review (?) by a Harvard Law Professor(?) whose name escapes me at the moment. I know it was around 1920, and either Harvard Law Review or Harvard Law Prof or both, if anyone wants to look it up). So by 1940 the US eventually came up with the "method of equal proportions," which is too difficult to describe here but which they have used ever since every ten years after each census.
(a good overview--but only an overview-- of some of these issues can be found at http://www.mit.edu/~17.251/redistricting.pdf for other geeks out there like myself).
NOW WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SAMUEL ALITO!!!!!!!????!!!! :)
Good question. Samuel Alito has been criticized for his criticism of the "one person, one vote" standard. NOT THE STANDARD PER SE, as the despicable elements amongst his opponents will try to allege, but rather, crtitical of its hyperabsurd arithmetic applicability--the notion that ALL districts have to have almost-exactly-equal numbers of people in them no matter how ridiculous the districts so created end up becoming. Maybe keep an entire county in some state in the same US Conrgessional District and settle for a 3% variance in populations, rather than take one of its 15 townships out of it and get a 0.4% variance--makes sense to me!!!!!...
...and also to the US Supreme Court, although they may never have said so explicitly. See (and we finally get to Montana!!!!), after the 1990 Census, Montana sued the US Department of Commerce (which runs the census) because the "method of equal proportions" of assigning seats in the US House of representatives ended up costing it a seat in Congress. "Hey, it happens all the time, every ten years, get over it Big Skyers" blah blah blah...but Montana actually raised an interesting issue. See, Montana went from two House seats to one--one super-large, At-Large seat that had like 886,000 people!!!!! Big seat, VERY big seat, almost twice the size as the smallest seats in the House--so wasn't that unfair???? Wasn't the "method of equal proportions" unfair..and in violation of the "one person one vote" concept?????
NO, said the US Supreme Court!!!!!! In 1992, they upheld the Constitutionality of the "method of equal proportions" WHILE AT THE SAME TIME SAYING THAT IT MET THE STANDARD OF "ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE!!!!!!" Ergo, even by throwing out the sui generis cases of states that have only one House seat, some states with the same number of House members had variations of like 18% in the average sizes of their House districts. Wow, that's a HUGE variation...but, since it dealt with pre-existing entities like states of the United States, certainly "communities of common interest," it was allowed to stand!!!! Now, while residing in one state as opposed to another is a much bigger switch than crossing a county line or a school district line within a state, still, those latter boundary lines also have significance within states for matters such as taxation, form of local government, land-use rules, jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies (in some states state police have no jurisdiction in certain counties, as the New York state police have no jurisdiction in the five counties collectively known as New York City)., etc. etc. etc. SO WHY, THEN, CUT ACROSS THOSE BORDERS TO RELIGIOUSLY ADHERE TO MATHEMATICALLY-EQUAL POPULATIONS IN STATE HOUSE DISTRICTS?????!!!!!!!!
Samuel Alito asks that very good question, and has taken positions in his writings to that effect. Some of the vermin opposed to him are trying to make him look like a racist for doing so. They are not correct; even the US Supreme Court said so in 1992. Whether or not this becomes an issue in his confirmation hearings remains to be seen, but at any rate he is in the right with the positions he has taken on this, and hopefully he can get onto the Supreme Court if for no other reason than to deal with some of the issues related to "one person, one vote" and other districting issues that will be coming before it in the near future.
That last matter had been predicted before the hearings began, namely, that those who couldn't "Bork" him on his legal credentials might go after that CAP issue. I could easily comment on that issue as that organization was very active on campus during the years when I attended that university, but really, the positions that CAP took--and the tone that they used to present them--really deserve their own full and complete telling in their own right, and not merely as an undercard for these Alito hearings. Suffice it to say that they might remind a contemporary conservative talk-radio junkie of Michael Savage--someone whose opinions you might agree with, but who is so offensive and so obnoxious that you wonder whether or not he's a plant for the other side, an agent provocateur designed to cause problems from within. CAP was that obnoxious.
So, the one issue that was predicted to come up in the attempted Borking of Samuel Alito seems to have both come forth, and seems to be going nowhere. Let me then turn my attention to another issue that was predicted to possibly arise,w hich so far hasn't ut which still might AND which actually has jurisprudential significance--the issue of redistricting, specifically "one person, one vote." For those of you who don't know what that is, it basically is a US Supreme Court decision which requires that, consistent with "equal protection under the law," when district lines are drawn for elected representative bodies like state legislatures, city councils, etc., that those districts have roughly equal populations. That is to prevent a state legislature with, say 80 Legislators, from having some of its districts with 30,000 people living in them and others with 74,000--if every legislator gets one and only one vote, it's easy to see that the people in the district with 30k people have a much greater per capita voice in the State House than the people in the district with 74k people. Easy enough--and fair enough.
I am unfamiliar with the cases that came before the US Supreme Court that generated this standard, but I believe that they are from the 1960s, and involved seats where rural areas in certain (southern?) states had (significantly) greater per capita representation in their state legislatures than did urban areas, and there was some element of skin color involved too, in that by and large black citizens had, in effect, less per capita representation than white citizens did. Fair enough, and it's good that we now have that "one person, one vote" standard to guide us...although, in fairness to our country, our situation NEVER got SO BAD as the British situation, where House Of Commons seats drawn many centuries ago ended up in some cases by the 20th century as having zero (zero!) inhabitants!!!!!! Admittedly it seems that way sometimes, when one looks at some members of the US Hosue and US Senate, as "NO ONE" could possibly have voted for them and therefore they must represent an area where "NO ONE" lives, but in fact that is not the case, they all (scary thought!!!) come from some place where someone, somewhere actually voted for them.
No, the case at hand in the Alito hearings is not the fairness of the "one person, one vote" standard, nor its existence, but rather its applicability. The application of the standard, the notion that every apportioned representative should represent roughly the same number of people, has been taken so far, and to such ridiculous lengths, that it has degenerated into arithmetic absurdity and resulted in the creation of district lines that when viewed on a map are so ridiculous that they look like the chicken scratch of a blindfolded toddler. In other words, with the exact population figures available to state legislatures and those other entities charged with the drawing of district lines which are provided to them every ten years by the "actual enumeration" known as the US Census, especially empowered with the numerical and graphical power of even commercially-available computers in the last 20 or so years, district lines have been drawn so ridiculously and so much with a singleminded adherence to "one person one vote" that in many cases they bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to any sort of natural or pre-existing political, social, or geographical real-world boundaries. That is to say, the district lines for seats like US Congress, state representative or state legislature, city council etc., in many cases end up willy-nilly crossing rivers, township boundaries, county or school district boundaries, dividing communities down the middle of roads or even residential streets, and otherwise making no sense whatsoever, all for the purpose of making sure that at one point in the past they contained almost-exactly-equal numbers of people on the date of April 1st in a year ending in zero when the US Census is considered to be taken. This level of ridiculousness is not *necessarily* mandated by the US Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" requirement, but so many states and localities live in fear of a federal civil rights suit--and don't want to incur the expenses involved in litigation if they are on the receiving end of one--that in effect, district lines are regularly drawn with regard to no other factor than the "mathematical equivalence" standard (and the skin-color demographics of the citizens so involved, which was also a factor in the original US Supreme Court case).
So this standard, good as it is, has been applied to an absurd degree. NOW WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MONTANA AND ITS US CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION!!!!????!?!?!?!!
Well, like many other things in life, there's a link that's not immediately apparent. See, the US House of Representatives is one of those legislative bodies which apportions it representatives based on population. That is, in fact, the official reason why the US Census is conducted every ten years. A total tally is taken of the population of the country as a whole, and of each state in particular, and each state gets to send to Congress a number of representatives "proportional" to its population. (The US Senate, of course, is different--two Senators from every state).
Simple as that notion of Proportionality" might seem, it is in fact actually very difficult to balance. If there were 14 total seats to assign to three bodies of 5,000 people each, each body should get 4 2/3 seats--how would that work??!?!?!? One way of doing so is to "tinker" with the seats--in the above case it would be easy to make 15 total seats, and each body gets 5 reps. For a while the US House did just that, but even then it wasn't easy--the very first veto ever cast by a US President was when George Washington vetoed the first Congressional reapportionment plan after the 1790 Census. Still, it's doable--if you're willing to tinker with the total number of seats.
Starting in 1913, the US House wasn't willing to tinker anymore--it set the total size of the US House at 435 members. The problem with that was that the formula they were then using to assign seats to each state, the "Vinton" or Hamilton" method, created what was hypothetically called the "Alabama Paradox," where one state (in this case, Alabama) could theoretically be the only state in the Union to GAIN population, where every other state in the Union LOSES population...and yet Alabama would still lose seats in the US House!!!! (This did not actually happen, but was discussed as a possibility in a 1920(?) article in the Harvard Law Review (?) by a Harvard Law Professor(?) whose name escapes me at the moment. I know it was around 1920, and either Harvard Law Review or Harvard Law Prof or both, if anyone wants to look it up). So by 1940 the US eventually came up with the "method of equal proportions," which is too difficult to describe here but which they have used ever since every ten years after each census.
(a good overview--but only an overview-- of some of these issues can be found at http://www.mit.edu/~17.251/redistricting.pdf for other geeks out there like myself).
NOW WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SAMUEL ALITO!!!!!!!????!!!! :)
Good question. Samuel Alito has been criticized for his criticism of the "one person, one vote" standard. NOT THE STANDARD PER SE, as the despicable elements amongst his opponents will try to allege, but rather, crtitical of its hyperabsurd arithmetic applicability--the notion that ALL districts have to have almost-exactly-equal numbers of people in them no matter how ridiculous the districts so created end up becoming. Maybe keep an entire county in some state in the same US Conrgessional District and settle for a 3% variance in populations, rather than take one of its 15 townships out of it and get a 0.4% variance--makes sense to me!!!!!...
...and also to the US Supreme Court, although they may never have said so explicitly. See (and we finally get to Montana!!!!), after the 1990 Census, Montana sued the US Department of Commerce (which runs the census) because the "method of equal proportions" of assigning seats in the US House of representatives ended up costing it a seat in Congress. "Hey, it happens all the time, every ten years, get over it Big Skyers" blah blah blah...but Montana actually raised an interesting issue. See, Montana went from two House seats to one--one super-large, At-Large seat that had like 886,000 people!!!!! Big seat, VERY big seat, almost twice the size as the smallest seats in the House--so wasn't that unfair???? Wasn't the "method of equal proportions" unfair..and in violation of the "one person one vote" concept?????
NO, said the US Supreme Court!!!!!! In 1992, they upheld the Constitutionality of the "method of equal proportions" WHILE AT THE SAME TIME SAYING THAT IT MET THE STANDARD OF "ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE!!!!!!" Ergo, even by throwing out the sui generis cases of states that have only one House seat, some states with the same number of House members had variations of like 18% in the average sizes of their House districts. Wow, that's a HUGE variation...but, since it dealt with pre-existing entities like states of the United States, certainly "communities of common interest," it was allowed to stand!!!! Now, while residing in one state as opposed to another is a much bigger switch than crossing a county line or a school district line within a state, still, those latter boundary lines also have significance within states for matters such as taxation, form of local government, land-use rules, jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies (in some states state police have no jurisdiction in certain counties, as the New York state police have no jurisdiction in the five counties collectively known as New York City)., etc. etc. etc. SO WHY, THEN, CUT ACROSS THOSE BORDERS TO RELIGIOUSLY ADHERE TO MATHEMATICALLY-EQUAL POPULATIONS IN STATE HOUSE DISTRICTS?????!!!!!!!!
Samuel Alito asks that very good question, and has taken positions in his writings to that effect. Some of the vermin opposed to him are trying to make him look like a racist for doing so. They are not correct; even the US Supreme Court said so in 1992. Whether or not this becomes an issue in his confirmation hearings remains to be seen, but at any rate he is in the right with the positions he has taken on this, and hopefully he can get onto the Supreme Court if for no other reason than to deal with some of the issues related to "one person, one vote" and other districting issues that will be coming before it in the near future.
posted by Greg Yoest at 4:58 AM
0 comments
