Thirty-Thousand.org

I think, J.E., that you're ignoring the significance of the Philadelphia Convention. The Congress of the Confederation may have thought that it had control of the agenda, but it soon slipped away when they came back with a whole new Constitution (or, you might say, an amendment in the form of a subs...

I can offer some brief color on this. The 17th Amendment only happened because of this very process. The Senate had absolutely resisted popular election of Senators for quite some time. However, more and more State Legislatures chimed in that they'd like to call a convention to consider the subject,...

The apportionment figure must include illegal aliens and other noncitizens due to constitutional imperative. "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.&quo...

Consider this as well. In Vieth v. Jubelirer , 541 U.S. 267 (2004), the Supreme Court refused to correct a fairly obvious gerrymander of Pennsylvania's congressional districts. Although the Court could not agree upon a majority decision, the 4 dissenting votes (which sought to intervene) could not a...

You're position here is far too narrow. In Wood .v Broom the court ruled that the "equally populous, contiguous, compact" characteristics of electoral districts legislated in 1911 expired when those provisions were not set forth in the The Reapportionment Act of 1929. thus declaring that ...

This "pronouncement" simply is _WRONG_ . Nowhere in the Constitution as amended and interpreted by previous court decrees is a "decision to limit the Hose of Representatives to 435 members ... expressly committed to the discretion of the Congress". The Congress was _NOT_ origina...

The Trucker is incorrect when he says that this has never been challenged in federal court. In U.S. Dep't of Commerce v. Montana , 503 U.S. 442 (1992), the State of Montana challenged the apportionment rules on a variety of grounds, one of which was that the use of the Huntington-Hill Method deprive...

I hope the silence my comments got are not a sign that you think I'm pulling an Octobox.

"One man, one vote" is found nowhere in the Constitution. Traditionally, apportionment debates were considered nonjusticiable (i.e., not something that it was appropriate for the courts to involve themselves in). The problem with this extreme degree of deference is that legislatures abused...

It's worth noting that Whelan and Wendelken demonstrate that the assertion of the Apportionment.us people, that the courts have never been asked to provide the remedy of an increase in the size of the House, is false; both cases sought precisely that sort of relief.

Martin E. WENDELKEN, Plaintiff, v. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, N.Y., N.Y., Director of the Bureau of the Census Bruce Chapman, Secretary of the Department of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige, Attorney General of the United States William French Smith, Department of Justice, Clerk of the House of Representatives ...

Whelan is from 1976, it isn't the Apportionment.us case; someone in this thread had asked for its text, though, so I provided it. Apportionment.us is doomed to failure, for good reason; whatever your feeling about the size of the House (and I am certainly pro-enlargement), it is not the place of th...

Robert P. WHELAN, Plaintiff, v. Mario CUOMO, Secretary of State of the State of New York, Defendant No. 75-C-549 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK 415 F. Supp. 251 June 15, 1976 JUDD, District Judge. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER In this civil rights action plaintiff seeks to ...