The People's House

One of the more persistent problems with our democracy is the distance between politicians and the people. This is exacerbated by the gradual increase of the constituency, since the House of Representatives has not been expanded in almost 100 years. In the Senate it's far worse, as equal protection laws are violated on a daily basis, with my representation in California equaling the representation of Wyoming, despite this state having 74 times as many people in it. This problem of unequal representation exists in the House as well, and a group of lawyers have organized a challenge to the status quo, calling for an expansion of the House to address these inequities.

The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.

That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.

“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. “As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

No incumbent will really want to change a system that dilutes their own power. They won't even sign off on giving DC voting rights in the House and expanding the body to 437 (there's an extra member for Utah in that compromise measure). But for decades, this was standard practice, with the House expanding from 65 members to 435. Other countries have governing bodies of up to 600 members despite having smaller countries. Our Congressional districts hold 700,000 people on average, which is just incredibly unwieldy. This would also rejigger the Electoral College in Presidential elections, as each state gets electoral votes based on their number of Representatives. Adding seats to shrink Congressional districts would dilute the inequity of the Senate in those elections and move us closer to a one-person, one-vote standard there.

Really we should have a unicameral legislature and a national popular vote for President, but those are a way off. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on mandating additional House members, and given the current makeup, not much good may come of that either. But it's time to build a political coalition for these changes. The bigger a Congressional district gets, the further removed that member of Congress gets from the people. It leads to Blue Dogs who don't vote their districts but can fake it using campaign contributions from corporate interests. It makes it harder for challengers to raise their profile. If you want to spark something TRULY populist, contra the teabaggers, it would be to expand the House of Representatives.

No More Taxation Without Representation?

The DC Voting Rights Act passed today in the Senate by a vote of 61-37. It moves to the House, where it will be virtually assured of passage, and then in all likelihood to the US Supreme Court, where a ruling will be made on the constitutionality of offering voting rights to a member of Congress who is not from a state. Jonathan Turley says it's plainly unconstitutional, but others differ:

Judge Kenneth Starr, during congressional testimony in 2004, asserted the constitutionality of Congress using the District Clause to confer voting representation:

"The use of the word ‘state’ [in the Constitution] cannot bar Congress from exercising its plenary authority [under the District Clause] to extend the franchise to District residents."

Professor Viet Dinh concluded in a 2004 memorandum that the framers of the Constitution did not intend to deprive citizens of the most basic right of democracy – the right to have a voting representative in Congress:

“There are no indications, textual or otherwise, to suggest that the framers intended that Congressional authority under the District Clause, extraordinary and plenary in all other respects, would not extend also to grant District residents representation in Congress.”

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee this month, the American Bar Association concurred with the analysis of Starr and Dinh:

“Enactment of the proposed [bill] would be an exercise of this constitutional authority conferred by the “District Clause”.... Not only is there a moral obligation for Congress to restore such rights, there is also a constitutional obligation for Congress to ensure the right of D.C. residents to the equal protection of the laws...”

Ultimately, the arguments don't matter as much as the numbers on the Supreme Court, and once again Anthony Kennedy will be the likely swing vote. Even if the court battle fails, however, Jerome Armstrong sees a road to statehood for the District:

"We will certainly be celebrating once the DC Voting Rights Act is passed," Zherka emphasized. "It will be a momentous win. But then, it's on to the business of defending any legal challenges to the legislation and looking towards future victories such as Senate representation and broader, local autonomy for the District."

The 'solution' is sorta a cut-the-baby-in-half one. DC gets a single Rep in the House, and one more is added, which goes to Utah and the GOP. But the issue of whether this is constitutional is a pretty big one-- since when do places that are not states have Congressional representation?

It will go to the courts, and I would not be shocked to see it reversed; because its not really that great of a precedent, and it doesn't really entirely solve the problem. If that happens, then it will go back to Congress, and force the issue of statehood-- which it should.

That's down the road. For the moment, 500,00 American citizens are closer to representation in their government.

...Also, the Senate had to take away the rights of the district to set their own gun control laws as a condition of representation, which sure sounds like the conservative mantra of "local control" to me! The Ensign Amendment passed (I'm not sure why it needed to, after Heller). Here's Clay Risen:

And Republicans wonder why D.C. votes overwhelmingly Democratic. Maybe it's because for all their talk of states' rights and federalism, when it comes to Washington the GOP is aggressively paternalistic, to the point where a senator from Nevada can, with a straight face, presume to tell Washingtonians the best way to run their city.

Senate Two-Fer

Good news from the world's most deliberative body. First, Hilda Solis will be confirmed tonight, after unanimous consent was achieved to proceed to a full vote without the need for cloture. This is a great progressive victory for President Obama's cabinet. It will be a new day to have a Secretary of Labor who cares about Labor again.

Also, the Senate advanced the DC Voting Rights Act, which would add two seats to the House of Representatives, one for DC (which has more residents than Wyoming and no representation) and one (for now) for Utah, which just missed out on an extra seat after the last Census. These things are commonly done by compromise, but getting DC residents a voting member is crucially important. There could be a final vote as early as tonight.

Harry Reid gets a pat on the head.

Country First

The lack of representation for the nearly 600,000 residents of Washington, DC is an enduring scandal and shame, a very real betrayal of the principles that led to the American Revolution. Yesterday, the Congress moved closer to erasing this blot when a Senate Committee approved the compromise plan that would give a voting member to DC and an extra voting member to Utah until the next apportionment after the 2010 Census. The vote had only one dissenter - John McCain.

McCain was the only one of them who voted nay, and he gave two reasons. The first was that the proposed compromise that would give D.C. voting rights while giving Utah a fourth seat in Congress was unfair to other fast-growing states. The second was that McCain didn’t want to pass a bill that constitutional scholars are still tussling over “and then have the Supreme Court decide whether or not it’s constitutional.”

This is a problem. What would happen if — a totally random example here — a senator introduced a campaign finance law that, according to many constitutional scholars and the president of the United States, violated the First Amendment? What if the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not the law was constitutional? That would be crazy.

Dave Weigel is a libertarian and I don't necessarily agree with him about McCain-Feingold, but the core idea that Congress can't make a law because the Supreme Court might overturn it would essentially end all lawmaking entirely, wouldn't it?

Because of this technical and entirely bullshitty reason, John McCain told the residents of DC, people he's walked among for 26 years, to go stuff it. What a man of the people.

No Taxation Without Representation

Residents of DC may finally get a vote in the House under a compromise plan that was reintroduced in the Congress today.

The D.C. House Voting Rights Act will be reintroduced by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat and the District's non-voting House member, and Sens. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican.

The legislation would give one House vote to the District and a fourth one to Utah, which narrowly missed getting an additional seat after the last U.S. Census. Utah, which traditionally leans to the right politically, now has one Democrat and two Republicans in the House and is the next to receive a new seat based on the last census.

"Men and women of the District have fought bravely in our wars, many giving their lives in defense of our country, yet they have no vote on the serious questions of war and peace," Mr. Lieberman said.

If the bill makes it through Congress, it will increase the number of House members for the first time in 96 years.

Obama was a co-sponsor of this bill in the last Congress. He would support it, and with expanded numbers in the Senate, where it got 57 votes the last time around, I would guess that it has a very good chance of passage.

It's absurd that it's taken this long and requires this compromise with Utah. DC got electoral college representation in 1961, and a voting rights Constitutional amendment passed the Congress in 1978 (it failed to get 3/4 of the states to ratify within the seven-year window). It's absurd that we have 581,000 Americans with no voting representation in Congress. If 580,000 white people in Oklahoma were being denied voting rights, you can bet this would have been cleared up by now.

If anything, the proposal isn't bold enough. To rebut the Constitutionality claims, you could give DC statehood and create a small federal district around the White House and government buildings that wouldn't disenfranchise a single American. DC has more residents than Wyoming, so it's not an exceptional scenario. If that was too politically thorny you could retrocede that portion into Virginia or Maryland, and create the same federal district. Furthermore, since the House hasn't expanded their ranks in 96 years and yet the population has doubled many times over, it would make a lot of sense to expand the Congress to 500 members or more, to put the representatives closer to the people they represent.

But this bill at the very least would be an improvement and a victory for democracy. What is being done right now is unconscionable.

Pop Warner

I thought that when John Warner announced his retirement, the pressure would be off of him to satisfy his President and his party, and he would be better positioned to vote his conscience. It turns out that his conscience pales in comparison to flattery:

Just when it looked as if Senator Jim Webb's troop readiness bill might pick up enough GOP support to reach the magic number of 60 filibuster-proof votes, we're now getting word that Senator John Warner is reconsidering his backing for it and may vote against it.

So reports the Wall Street Journal in a subscription only article. In a bit of a cruel joke, here's the reason Warner is giving for not backing a measure that would give exhausted troops more rest:

...in an interview Tuesday, the senator said he is "reconsidering his position" in light of the administration's willingness to move closer to him on expediting some reduction in U.S. troop levels this year in Iraq. "It took a lot of convincing to make the first units come home before Christmas," Mr. Warner said. "There is a lot of importance in that."

They did the meaningless thing I asked for! They like me, they really like me! I can't cross 'em now!

Warner also voted against giving nearby Washington, DC a voting representative in Congress, the only Senator of a contiguous area to do so. I guess since those DC residents aren't as - ahem - patrician as he is, they ought not to count.

(The common refrain amongst Republicans on this is that you can't give DC the vote because the Constitution forbids it and it requires an amendment. Of course, if that ever came up for a vote they'd vote against that too. They hide behind this notion that DC must be free of partisanship and therefore can't have voting members. Right, because the working-class citizens of DC would simply be able to bribe their Congressperson... oh wait, that's what every lobbyist in the country does, poor black people don't have the money to raise such a voice. This is purely about race - they don't want to see two black DC Senators down the road, which is not even what this bill provides.)

John Warner truly is Lucy Van Pelt with the football. But we can still honor our soldiers and pass the Webb Amendment. Call your Senators today.

UPDATE: Why am I doubting the fact that "GOP moderates" (all 0 of them) are weighing loyalty to Bush versus political realities? If that were the case there would still be a Republican Congress.

Wherein I Agree With Joe Lieberman

The District of Columbia clearly should have representation in Congress. More people live in DC than some states, and the Congress makes decisions directly impacting DC all the time, and yet they are without representation. Furthermore, 437 representatives over 435 (the bill would add one more district to Utah to balance things out) makes Congress that much more representative of the people (I'd bump it to 500, myself). Failure to allow DC residents a voice is nothing more than airbrushed racism masked by arcane arguments that aren't even Constitutionally valid.

Critics have also raised the constitutional concern that the District is not a state. Article I of the Constitution says that the House of Representatives shall be composed of members elected by the people of "the several states."

However, Georgetown law professor Viet Dinh, President Bush's assistant attorney general for constitutional issues in his first term, detailed the many ways the Supreme Court has approved congressional action equating the District to a state for constitutional purposes. Whether "commerce among the states," federal lawsuits between "citizens of different states," "direct taxes . . . apportioned among the several states" and more, the court has ruled that the word "states" in various constitutional provisions includes our capital city.

We believe that the Framers, who gave Congress these powers, did not intend to deny Congress the right to grant the vote to the District as well.

No taxation without representation. Give DC a vote.

What Congress Is Doing Right

Some Gallup poll numbers came out showing a plunge in approval ratings for Congress after a significant uptick. The numbers are still above what they were for the dreaded 109th Republican Congress, and other polls suggest Gallup may be an outlier. But I think that Democrats in general aren't doing enough to highlight successes. So allow me to note some.

I've been critical of the Democratic leadership for how they're handling the Iraq debate, and I think that things are moving out of conference committee entirely too slow. We have two major pieces of the first 100 hours agenda passed by both houses of Congress, and they've fallen off the radar screen for weeks. Getting those to the President's desk would do a lot to blunt criticism. Nevertheless, here are some encouraging items:

• A trio of open government bills passed by the House would compel more records to be turned over during Freedom of Information Act requests, require public acknowledgement for donors to presidential libraries, and ensure that the public can scrutinize Presidential records. They sound like inside baseball, but they're crucial for history and the public record to ensure that government secrecy goes out with the Bush Administration. All of these bills had substantial bipartisan support.

• The Accountability in Contracting Act passed the House, which would minimize no-bid contracts (and require public justification for them), eliminate "cost-plus" contracts that make it financially beneficial for contractors to waste taxpayer dollars, mandate disclosure of any cost overruns, and close the "revolving door" whereby former federal government officials become contractors seeking business from government. This should also be called "The Most Sane Legislation in the World Act." The vote was 347-73.

• Byron Dorgan is leading the charge in questioning Halliburton's move to Dubai, which appears to be an attempt to slither out of having to pay taxes after fleecing taxpayers for years.

• The House is finally giving taxpayers in Washington, DC representation, moving toward passing a bill awarding two additional seats to Congress, one to DC and another to Utah, which would get one in the next Census anyway. The Bush Administration is threatening to veto this bill because everyone knows that people who live in Washington, DC shouldn't have a say in their government (?).

• A proposed bill by California Rep. Mike Honda would amend the No Child Left Behind Act to require parental opt-ins before military recruiters take their children's personal information. Right now every school must give the personal data of all their students to the military without notifying the parents. That's wrong, and this amendment would reverse it.

• I'm most pleased to announce that Sen. Dick Durbin, as he pledged in a blogger meeting I attended last month, introduced the Fair Elections Act, which allows for public financing of Congressional elections. He even got bipartisan support, as Arlen Specter (R-PA) cosponsored.

The Fair Elections Now Act would restore public confidence in the election process by allowing qualified candidates to receive campaign funds from the Senate Fair Elections Fund instead of asking for money from private interests. In return, participating candidates would voluntarily agree to limit their campaign spending to the amount allocated to them. This voluntary alternative to traditional privately financed campaigns would free candidates from the incessant, time-consuming money chase that has tainted public perceptions of elected officials and fostered abuses that undermine our democracy. Candidates could instead devote their time and energy to talking with their constituents about the issues that are important to them.

We're never going to totally get rid of the corrosive power of money in politics. But this bill would go a long way to restoring some basic fairness and allow legislators to legislate again.

• Finally, Nancy Pelosi has promised to bring a measure requiring Congressional authorization for any attack on Iran to a vote, and I plan to hold her to it.

This is all outside of the search for justice in the US Attorney Purge scandal. But it shows that the Congress is trying to do the people's business in many respects, and they ought to be recognized for that.