The current House of Representatives is grossly unrepresentative
By D.R. and M.D.
NO SOONER had Barack Obama been re-elected than John Boehner sought to pre-empt the president’s argument that his agenda had been vindicated. “The American people want solutions,” the speaker of the House said, “and tonight, they’ve responded by renewing our House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates.”
Did not! The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote for divided government. It’s a clean sweep.
The House of Representatives is supposed to be the arm of government that most closely reflects the popular will. Its members are allocated by population, serve brief two-year terms and represent small districts, giving every citizen a local representative who will advocate directly for their interests. In the (probably apocryphal) formulation of George Washington, the House is supposed to channel the people’s passions like hot tea, which is subsequently served up to the contemplative Senate for cooling.
For most of modern political history, the chamber has fulfilled this duty admirably. When one party won a big lead in the popular vote—as the Democrats did often from 1954-92—it exaggerated their advantage, helping the voters’ preferred party enact its agenda. Following the Watergate scandal, Democrats won 59% of House votes in 1974 and 57% in 1976; they were rewarded with 67% of the chamber in both years. In contrast, when the vote has been closely split, the House has generally reflected a divided electorate: from 1998 to 2004, the Republicans’ share of representatives (51%, 51%, 53% and 53%) closely matched their percentage of the vote (51%, 50%, 52% and 51%).
However, in the first vote following the decennial redistricting process in 2010—when Republicans took advantage of their strong performances in state legislative elections to set a new standard for gerrymandering—the House has completely abandoned the popular will. Not only is the wrong party in control, but it reigns with a sizable majority: despite receiving just 49.6% of the two-party vote, the Republicans have 54% of the seats. The GOP will have a bigger share of the House in the next Congress than it did following Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America”-fuelled Republican Revolution of 1994, when it won 53.5% of the two-party vote and 53% of the seats.
It is not the first time that a party has won a majority of seats in the House despite receiving fewer votes than its rival. Mr Gingrich’s team won re-election and a 26-seat majority in 1996, on 47.8% of the vote to 48.1% for the Democrats. In 1942 Sam Rayburn managed to attain a 13-seat majority for the Democrats in the mid-terms, even though his party won 46% of the vote to the Republicans’ 51% (small wonder that Rayburn holds the record as the longest-serving speaker). But rarely does it produce such a skewed result as we've seen in the House this year.
It’s also not fair to attribute the current democratic (with both a lower- and upper-case “D”) deficit entirely to gerrymandering. As Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, notes, the fact that Democrats tend to live in cities causes them to be concentrated in fewer Congressional districts. This means they would probably be under-represented even in the absence of a partisan effort to weaken them. He cites a report showing that the GOP secured 11 seats during the 2010 redistricting—meaning that the Democrats would still be a minority in the House even if the pre-2010 map were still in effect.
But it is a problem for the country that the House has ceased to reflect the immediate popular will. The current crop of Congressional Republicans have proved themselves willing to go to unprecedented lengths—principally putting the Treasury at risk of default—in order to implement their policy agenda, despite holding only one of the three elected arms of the federal government. With the fiscal cliff looming, perhaps the biggest changes in decades to the role of government in the economy will be negotiated by a party that was rejected at the polls.
For at least the next two years, America will remain stuck with a gravely unrepresentative House of Representatives. Since Mr Obama will need the Republicans’ assent to prevent the economy from tipping back into recession, he probably cannot afford to antagonise them by publicly questioning the legitimacy of their majority in the lower chamber. The simplest way to restore the House’s democratic credibility would be a constitutional amendment adopting proportional representation. But that is both unrealistic and undesirable, since it would sever the link between individual members of Congress and their constituents that gives the House its vitality.
Barring such a drastic measure, it is up to the states to change their districting procedures one by one. Fixing the system would require solving an enormous collective-action problem. If states controlled by Democrats decide to appoint independent committees to draw boundaries but those run by Republicans do not, the GOP’s structural advantage in the House would only grow. (This is the same obstacle that supporters of a national popular vote for the presidency are trying to surmount.)
The only viable method for Democrats to reinstate the House’s democratic integrity is to win a healthy majority of state governments in 2020, threaten to gerrymander to their own advantage, and then use that leverage to extract a deal from state Republican parties for a non-partisan districting process. The Democrats have shown they have the support of a majority of voters across the country. But all politics is local, and they will have to do as well in the states as they do nationwide in order to get their just deserts in Congress.
