Figures never lie, but liars often figure

Continuing with our semi-non-indepth look at the U.S. House of Representatives, we now know (or we would if we read the preceding post) that the U.S. contains 435 congressional districts. According to the census taken in 2010, the official population of the United States was 308,745,538. But wait! (as they say in television infomercials) -- that figure includes the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.), which is represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by a 436th member who does not have voting privileges. When the 2010 population of the District of Columbia (601,723) is subtracted from the national total, a new total for our purposes emerges: 308,143,815.

So then an “average” congressional district in the U.S. according to the 2010 census -- obtained simply by dividing 308,143,815 by 435 -- would contain 708,376 people.

However, there is no such thing as an “average” congressional district because the population of the United States is not distributed evenly across the 50 states (that is -- pay attention, you there in the back -- some states have more people than others). Also, the districts do not cross state lines. The most populous congressional district, the entire state of Montana, has 989,415 people. The least populous congressional district, the entire state of Wyoming, has 563,626 people.

Seven states in all have a single congressional district comprising the entire state. They are Wyoming (563,626), Vermont (625,741), North Dakota (672,591), Alaska (710,231), South Dakota (814,180), Delaware (897,934), and Montana (989,415).

Five more small states have only two congressional districts. They are Rhode Island (1,052,567), New Hampshire (1,316,470), Maine (1,328,361), Hawaii (1,360,301), and Idaho (1,567,582). So a current Rhode Island representative represents, on average, 526,283 people; a New Hampshire representative represents, on average, 658,235 people, and so forth.

At the other end of the chart are the most populous states, California (37,253,956 people, 53 congressional districts), Texas (25,145,561 people, 36 congressional districts, New York (19,378,102 people, 27 congressional districts), and Florida (18,801,310 people, 27 congressional districts).

Do the math. The average California congressional district contains 702,904 people; the average Texas congressional district contains 698,487 people; the average New York congressional district contains 717,707 people; and the average Florida congressional district contains 696,344 people.

In between the five single-district states and the four most populous states (which have 143 seats between them in the House of Representatives) are 41 other states with their own calculated “average” congressional district. For example, Georgia, where I live, had 9,687,663 people in 2010 and its number of congressional districts was increased to 14, giving us an “average” Georgia congressional district of 691,975 people.

Isn’t this fascinating?

What do you mean, you don’t think so?

Of course it is.

Because I said so, that’s why.

And I said all of that to say this:

What George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm is true:

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Reapportionment

It’s not a dirty word.

Depending on whether you support the controlling majority party or the minority party in government, it can be either beautiful or ugly, though. And it is also one more thing: necessary.

As most Americans are aware, our government in the United States is composed of three branches -- the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. The President is head of the Executive branch. The Supreme Court Justices are top dogs in the Judicial branch. The Legislative branch, which makes our laws, consists of two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

In the Senate, every state has two members, no more and no less. This puts all states on an equal footing in the Senate.

The number of members a state has in the House of Representatives, however, depends on that state’s population. Every ten years our country takes a national census. There have been 23 censuses censusi censusim such counts taken in the United States, the first one in 1790.

Over the years since our country’s founding, the size of the House of Representatives was first increased with each passing decade as the population grew. In the first Congress, in 1788, a total of 65 members represented the original 13 states, and with a population of 3,929,000 each member represented about 60,000 persons. By 1913, however, there were 435 members representing 48 states, and with a population of 92,228,000 each member represented on average about 212,000 persons. Then, after the 1920 census was taken, an increase to 483 members was proposed. Since the size of the House of Representatives was fast becoming unwieldy, someone yelled, “Whoa, Nellie!” (not literally) and the number was frozen at 435. It has stayed at 435 ever since.

But the population kept growing and shifting. Some states gained population and some states lost population. In 1959 two states, Alaska and Hawaii, were added, bringing the total to 50. In 2000, our twenty-second census showed that the U.S. population had reached 281,421,000 and each of the 435 elected members represented about 509,000 persons during the past decade. In the twenty-third census, which was completed in 2010, our population reached 308,745,000 and each of the 435 members will represent, on average, about 709,000 persons for the next ten years. Well, at least at the beginning of the period, as the population continues to grow.

By contrast, the United Kingdom had a population of 60,587,000 people in 2006 and each of the 650 elected members of Parliament represents about 93,000 people.

In the U.S., each of the 50 states must re-draw its Congressional district boundaries after every national census so that its people are more or less equally distributed across its districts.

Georgia, where I live, currently sends 13 representatives to Congress. Our districts currently look like this:

As soon as the latest reapportionment takes effect, Georgia will send 14 representatives to Congress and the districts will be redrawn to look like this:

Cherokee County (county seat: Canton) is currently a part of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District of Georgia (the middle one of the three green areas to the right of the light blue area near the top of the first map), which is currently represented by Rep. Tom Price of Roswell, an orthopedic surgeon. We will become a part of Georgia’s Eleventh Congressional District of Georgia (the light blue area to the right of the red area on the second map), which is currently represented by Rep. Phil Gingrey of Marietta, an obstetrician.

Here is a nice chart you can click on in ever so many places to find out how the U.S. House of Representatives has changed during its history.

[Editor’s note.If you click on the link in the previous paragraph and poke around among the charts, be advised that the “Number of Representatives” figures for the various years are a bit misleading. I can’t make heads or tails of them. Sometimes they are the total number of representatives a state sends, and sometimes they are the number of additional representatives a state will be granted. So the maps are neither fish nor fowl, but some sort of strange combination of the two. If you can sort it all out, let me know. --RWP]

Hands across the sea and all that.

A parliamentary imbalance exists. I am speaking of how they do things in the United Kingdom and how we do things in the good old U. S. of A.

In my post the other day, the one that put all of you to sleep, I quoted the statistic that the estimated population of the U.S. is 306,000,000 and the U.S. House of Representatives has 435 members, and we learned that each representative represents, on average, 703,000 persons (some more, some less).

As is my wont, I was pootling around (jinksy’s term) the Internet and learned that the estimated population of the United Kingdom is 60,000,000 and also that the House of Commons, their equivalent to our House of Representatives, has 646 members (I thought it was 630, but apparently the number of seats was increased). Therefore, each member of the British House of Commons represents, on average, 92,879 persons.

It’s not fair. In order to achieve parity with the Brits and have one representative for every 92,879 persons in the U.S., we would have to increase the size of the U.S. House of Representatives to 3,294 members. That might prove a bit unwieldy, even for Nancy Pelosi.

Maybe the Brits could adopt our ratio. All they would have to do is reduce the number of elected members of Parliament to a nice workable number, 85. I don’t think our British cousins would stand for it even though Gordon Brown might like to give it a try.

It’s a historical fact that a major reason the American Revolution occurred was that the colonists disagreed with King George III over that little matter of taxation without representation.

More than 230 years have elapsed, and given the state of affairs on both sides of the Atlantic, I don’t much care for taxation even with representation.




Let all 646 members of the House of Commons and 435 members of the House of Representatives put that in their pipes and smoke it.

Cure for insomnia discovered

Public Law 62-5, an act of Congress in 1911, set the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives at 435. That number was expanded temporarily to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959, and then reverted to 435 in the reapportionment following the 1960 census. The U.S. Constitution states only that there will be a representative for no less than 30,000 citizens.

The first U.S. census in 1790 counted nearly four million Americans. By 2000, the number had grown to over 281 million. Based on a population clock maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population as of November 17, 2008, was 305,682,072 persons. It is expected to reach 308 million by 2010 and 439 million by 2050.

“So what?” you may be saying to yourself. “What does that have to do with me?”

If you are an American citizen, here’s what it has to do with you:

All men and women may be created equal, but all votes are not created equal. In 1790, the House of Representatives had 65 members and the U.S. had just under 4,000,000 population. Each representative elected to the United States House of Representatives represented around 61,000 persons. Currently, with 435 representatives for a population of more than 306,000,000 in the U.S., each representative represents around 703,000 persons. But that is only an average, and it gives a decidedly distorted view. Some House districts are currently nearly twice the size of others; for instance, there are about 944,000 residents in Montana’s single district, compared to about 515,000 in Wyoming’s. So we see that, the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

There is not room here to explain all the ramifications of what I just told you.

To understand the situation a little better, I recommend that you read every last word of this article from Wikipedia on congressional reapportionment followed by a thorough perusal (in the dictionary sense, not the popular sense) of this article, which includes a section on electoral apportionment that contains a table showing both the population per House seat in each state and the population per electoral vote (they are not the same).

This should be an eye-opening experience for many of you, but I fear it may have the opposite effect.

However, if you can name this happy couple, you will receive extra credit -- one point if you can name the gentleman, one point if you can name the building in Washington, D.C., named for him, one point if you know the lady’s maiden name, and one point if you can name the lady’s father. No cheating allowed.


Let’s make it a multiple-choice test:

1. The gentleman’s name is:
...(a) Henry Clay
...(b) Nicholas Longworth
...(c) Sam Rayburn
...(d) Eugene “Tip” O’Neill
...(e) None of the above

2. The building in Washington, D.C., named after him is:
...(a) The Capitol
...(b) The Lincoln Memorial
...(c) Union Station
...(d) Sam’s Pizza Parlor and Dry Goods Emporium
...(e) The Washington Monument

3. The lady is:
...(a) Norma Jean Baker Rayburn
...(b) Oona Chaplin O’Neill
...(c) Alice Roosevelt Longworth
...(d) Erma Bombeck Clay
...(e) None of the above.

4. The lady’s father was:
...(a) Charlie Chaplin
...(b) Howard Baker
...(c) Grover Cleveland
...(d) Teddy Roosevelt
...(e) No one knows for sure.

And five extra points if you can identify this guy:


He is none other than:
...(a) John McCormack (D, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(b) Joseph Martin (R, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(c) Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill (D, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(d) Dennis Hastert (R, Illinois), Speaker of the House
...(e) Nancy Pelosi (D, California), Speaker of the House
...(f) Newt Gingrich (R, Georgia), Speaker of the House