From Richard Winger's Ballot Access News:
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.
The Thicket has previously discussed the size of legislatures in "To Shrink or Grow the Size of the Legislature," "Imagine a Legislature with 11,000 Members" and "What's the Right Size for a Legislature?".
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