Jack & Jill Politics

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.”

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

Anyone tempted to ignore the 2010 Census will have a tough time doing it — especially if they have kids in school. The government has launched Census in Schools, an all-out campaign targeting superintendents, principals, teachers, students and, indirectly, parents, as schools open across the nation this month and next.

The message: The Census is coming and here's why everyone should care.

The goal is to send posters, teaching guides, maps and lesson plans to every school in the nation, Puerto Rico and U.S. island territories to encourage everyone to participate in the national count. The materials will land in more than 118,000 schools and reach 56 million students.

“It's great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes,” says Renee Jefferson-Copeland, chief of the Census schools program. “In households that are linguistically isolated, they can express the information to their parents.”

The school effort is more ambitious than in 2000, the last time the government set out to count everyone. At that time, teachers had to request the material and it was available only in print. Now, the kits and lessons will arrive in every school and lesson plans can be downloaded online, where they will be available in 28 languages.

Students' take-home assignment: Census kits

this should be politics 101 for you naivete.