Power imbalance in small-state House seats

It is not sufficient for Wyoming residents to have 70 times the clout of Californians in the U.S. Senate. Their power in the U.S. House of Representatives is nearly double that of Montana’s people.

Wyoming and Montana are among the seven states which are too small to be represented by more than one representative in the House. Washington, D.C., is home to 56,000 more people than Wyoming and is still forbidden from electing a voting representative to the House.

Dalton Conley and Jacqueline Stevens, professors at New York University and Northwestern, respectively, authored a New York Times op-ed on a broader context about Congress that reminds us that low-population states with a single representative range far afield in population. Wyoming’s representative serves slightly more than half as many people, 544,270, as the representative for Montana, population 974,989. (NYT, A23, 1/24/11) (U.S. Census Bureau, July 2009)

This disparity parallels the power imbalance in the Senate on a smaller scale, literally.

Because each state is allowed two senators, all 50 states have precisely the same amount of clout. As the least populous state, Wyoming is excessively powerful in the Senate compared to California, population 36.9 million, the largest number.

There are probably all kinds of disparities among the 435 House districts. Each representative is supposed to serve 700,000 people, though it seems like yesterday when the number was 600,000.

Conley and Stevens recount the House consisted of 65 members in 1787 and grew to its current number after 1910. “That’s because the 1920 census indicated that the majority of Americans were concentrating in cities, and nativists, worried about the power of ‘foreigners,’ blocked efforts to give them more representatives,” they write.

They urge expanding the number of House members and “shrinking the size of districts” which would afford a number of advantages, including an end to the disparity among low-population states. “More districts would likewise mean more precision in distributing them equitably, especially in low-population states,” they add.

An idea worth considering. However, they could be criticized on grounds that the House membership is already too big.

This writer’s humble suggestion: Allow congressional districts to overlap state lines. Delaware can share a second House member with Pennsylvania or Maryland, and Wyoming can donate two-sevenths of its lone representative’s attention to Colorado’s needs.

Or, the Senate could be abolished and its 100 seats would be added to the House. Population adjustments could then be made. The Senate was designed to provide a forum for wiser heads - like scandal-scarred John Ensign (Nevada) and David Vitter (Louisiana)? - to review actions of the House. The Senate does nothing but duplicate the partisan wrangling that is prevalent in the House.

While we may not concur with Conley and Stevens’ solution to this problem, we share their concern with these and other disparities in representation.