https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/o...districts.html
Who Needs Congressional Districts?
By MICHAEL TOMASKYFEB. 20, 2018
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed down its new set of congressional district lines on Monday, replacing those drawn by Republicans after they captured the state legislature in 2010. The state’s highest court had earlier ruled those lines unconstitutional.
The new map, The Times’s Nate Cohn said, “comes very close to achieving partisan balance.” Republicans, who held a big advantage under the old lines, plan to challenge the new ones in federal court.
It’s a huge fight, with enormous ramifications. But as they argue over what lines should go where, I ask you to consider a more fundamental question: Why have lines at all?
You’re thinking: “Why have lines? Because we have to! We have to have congressional districts!”
Well, yes, under current law we do. But Congress can change that law. And in our deeply polarized age, there’s an argument to be made that we might be better off if it did so.
There is nothing in the Constitution that says we have to have congressional districts. Article 1, Section 2, says merely that “the House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states.” No particular method is prescribed.
And indeed, in the early days of the republic, states did not uniformly use what we now call “single-member district” voting. Most did. But a few states used what was then called “general ticket” voting. Under this system, there were no districts. In those states in the first congressional elections, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists put up slates, and the side with the winning slate took all or most of the seats.
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As it happens, Pennsylvania was the state where the most experimenting was done. In that first Congress, it had no districts. Eight representatives were chosen under general-ticket voting, and the Federalists, the moneyed interests based in Philadelphia, dominated. By the time of the second Congress, the state switched to districts. Then it switched back. Then by the fourth Congress it had switched back again.
As new states were added, most went with districts, but not all did. By 1839, 17 states used districts, while nine did not (three of those nine had only one representative). Four slave states used general-ticket voting, which allowed them to vote with one voice on slavery questions.
Soon enough, push came to shove, and the Whigs — who controlled both Congress and the White House after the 1840 elections, but who worried that general-ticket voting favored the rival Democratic Party — passed the Apportionment Act of 1842, which outlawed general-ticket voting. President John Tyler, who had been elected as a Whig, signed the bill — but added a statement expressing doubts about the bill’s constitutionality. Four states, three of them Southern, defied the bill. In the 1850s, California and Minnesota joined the union and ignored the 1842 act.
After the Civil War, districts became the norm. But it wasn’t until the late 1960s that Congress finally mandated single-member districts — Hawaii was the last state to elect its two representatives at large. So since it’s just a matter of congressional law and not constitutional writ, we can always return to letting states choose.
What good would it do? Our divisions are deep and real and can’t be papered over with fixes like these. But it actually might help around the edges.
Consider, again, Pennsylvania. The lines that the court replaced this week took a state in which Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans, and where no Republican presidential candidate had won in more than 20 years, and gave it 13 Republican and five Democratic representatives. Some of those 13 represent districts that are ultraconservative and so don’t have to worry about attracting a single Democratic or even independent vote.
Now imagine that the state’s House delegation were chosen differently — nine from districts, and nine via general ticket. That latter group would have to win statewide. That means they’d be more likely to tailor a message that could win a respectable percentage of the vote in the Philadelphia suburbs, where most Pennsylvania statewide elections are won or lost. That might produce a different kind of representative — one who had incentives to compromise instead of incentives to obstruct.
Of course it might not. Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by maximizing the white-resentment vote, so others could do that, too. But there aren’t many Donald Trumps. Most candidates would probably work harder to find the state’s ideological center. Replicate this in a number of populous states over 10 or 20 years, and we’d have a very different Congress.
There is a bill with language to this effect now, written by Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia. It has many rivers to cross and won’t solve everything. But just remember that the next time you hear people arguing about where district lines should go, we might be better off if they weren’t there in the first place.
Michael Tomasky is a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 21, 2018, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Needs Congressional Districts?
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who needs congressional districts?
