Tag: Whitford v. Gill

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a case challenging Wisconsin's legislative district lines as an unconstitutional Republican gerrymander. Democratic voters are heavily clustered in central cities, sympathetic suburbs, and university towns, while Republican voters are more evenly spread around. Actually, the roots of the equal population requirement go back much further, to July 1787, when members of the Constitutional Convention agreed on clauses requiring that a federal census be conducted every ten years and that each state's number of representatives in the House be determined by the results of that census. The Framers were endorsing the principle that representation should be directly related to population. The Framers did not specify just how members should be chosen within a state. In 1842, Congress passed a statute requiring states to create districts with equal populations. Rural folk in return eliminated the equal population requirement so that rural-dominated legislatures in big states could create low-population rural districts that would elect Republicans and conservative Democrats. Of course, that's a consequence of clustering. The Wisconsin plaintiffs are, in effect, insisting that the Constitution requires proportional representation, a system widely used in foreign countries but not required by the Framers or by past Congresses. Republican redistricting advantages didn't prevent Democrats from winning House majorities in 2006 and 2008 and might not in the next two elections.