ROTTEN BOROUGHS AND OUR LAWLESS LAWMAKERS
Neuberger, Richard L.
Rotten Boroughs and Our Lawless Lawmakers By Richard L. Neuberger TN ancient times the voice of the sovereign was infinitely more powerful than that of anyone else. The Magna Charta and later the...
...Silver Bow County, where Butte's copper miners live, has 47,-990 inhabitants and one Montana state senator...
...Contrast this with the population of the 22nd Ohio district: 908,403...
...Thus, in spite of the constitution, a Cleveland welder or school teacher has only one-sixth as much representation in the national House as a South Dakota truck driver or wheat farmer...
...The 2nd district, a domain of vast grain and cattle ranches, has barely half this many residents—245,976...
...Yet otherwise the pattern is identical...
...It could not be more than 15 per cent off in population, when compared with the average of other districts in the state...
...Why should it be illegal to put artificial coloring in margarine, when dairy products may be colored artificially and without even any notice on the package to the customer...
...The 17th district is rural but the under-represented 8th district is the metropolitan area centering around Houston...
...Hartford and Colebrook each has two members in the Connecticut House of Representatives...
...What rare quality, perhaps peculiar to the remote Sierra Nevada Range, renders an Inyo County sheep rancher worthy of at least 300 times the strength in the California senate of a Los Angeles surgeon or trolley conductor...
...As a result, opinions of city dwellers are minimized and opinions of those who live in the country and small towns are maximized...
...This means each Congressman should have approximately the same number of constituents...
...Instead of losing Congressmen like Missouri, burgeoning California is receiving a bonanza of seven additional House members...
...Celler's bill has mustered impressive support...
...But, first, city people must vote...
...Yet the same legislature bristles indignantly and talks about "free enterprise" at the slightest suggestion of price controls for the benefit of consumers...
...Why should margarine bear a punitive tax...
...Rep...
...Approximately half of America's total automobile mileage is traveled inside city limits...
...Unfortunately, no magic remedy like the tractor is at hand in this situation...
...In Texas the 8th district has a population of 802,000, while the 17th district contains only 226,-000...
...All this has helped to whittle down rural population today to a bare 18 per cent of the national total...
...The population of Hartford is 166,000, that of Colebrook 547...
...But although the districts are presumed to be of equal population, Washington County has one House member for 7,550 people while Jefferson County has a House member for seven times this many people: 55,465...
...The hard and simple fact is that America has moved to town but its state legislatures have not...
...In other words, legislatures must -reapportion themselves if the expanding urban population is to receive the seats its numbers merit under the Jefferson-ian idea of "one man, one vote...
...In the state senate of Oregon I speak for 80,000 constituents residing in Portland, the state's one large city...
...Emanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a bill to put teeth into the long-dormant reapportionment provisions of the U. S. Constitution...
...In Seattle it takes 520,296 people to qualify for a member in the House of Representatives...
...The city dwellers of this country are denied their fair share of seats beneath the soaring marble domes of capitol buildings, where our laws are made...
...Attracted by the opportunities for companionship in the city, they did not go back to the soil...
...My colleagues guffawed loudly...
...As soon as the bill had passed overwhelmingly, I suggested that corresponding tax benefits be conferred by the state on city letter carriers, who were even more underpaid...
...In my own state the Portland Congressional district contains 468,-571 men, women, and children...
...Yet the national Constitution dictates that these districts be of equal population...
...This means that the rural dominance beneath the domes of state capitols is inevitably transplanted to Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C. Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois recently wrote in the New York Times: "Rural-dominated state legislatures have frequently refused to reapportion Congressional districts in accordance with changes in population...
...Consider: The 4,125,000 urban residents of Los Angeles County have one senator in the California legislature...
...If the district did not conform to these standards, the Congressman from the district would be denied his seat in the House...
...Louis districts to have 400,000 people apiece while some rural districts need have only 317,000 people...
...Los Angeles and San Francisco together contain practically 50 per cent of California's residents, but qualify for only 5 per cent of the senate desks at Sacramento...
...When only 44 per cent of Seattle's residents, and a mere 33 per cent of those in Portland go to the polls, it is an invitation for the rural tyranny to continue and flourish...
...Equal senate representation with them is enjoyed by the 13,560 rural inhabitants of Mono and Inyo Counties...
...But the constitution of Oregon specifies that each senator shall represent an equal number of citizens...
...Yet the disdain of legislators for city folks is often expressed in wondrous ways...
...He is the author of two books, "The Promised Land" and "Integrity— The Life of George W. Norris...
...Richard L. Maher of the Cleveland Press has pointed out that, although the bulk of Ohio's cigaret tax money is collected in the metropolitan regions, the "cornstalk brigade" in the legislature has seen to it that "not one urban school district can qualify for these funds, although some were on the verge of closing their schools...
...The Minnesota constitution, like that of Oregon, requires legislative zones of substantially the same population...
...In the 24 states which have the initiative and referendum, this remedy is at hand...
...It expresses itself in countless injustices in American life...
...In other states, city dwellers can elect governors and other high officials who are committed to equal legislative representation...
...Legislatures are usually the sole judge of their membership...
...The 2nd South Dakota district contains 148,147 residents...
...Yet the legislatures of the country have allotted only a pitiful 10% of gasoline tax revenues to the upkeep of city streets...
...The New York Times has declared that some such drastic bludgeon may be necessary to cope with "the reluctance of state legislatures to alter the boundaries of Congressional districts in conformity with the growth in population...
...A few paces away sits a senator with 8,300 constituents...
...Furthermore, jobs in factories and stores have been plentiful...
...Because Missouri is losing two Congressmen, its legislature has drawn up new zones which require St...
...Why, it just didn't make good sense...
...This means that city people can end the legislative oppression which rural minorities have held over them for many years...
...This issue is more than mere numbers...
...The Magna Charta and later the American Revolution helped end this tyranny...
...altruism, this just isn't done...
...The Colorado House of Representatives is supposed to be just what its name implies — a forum where the residents of a great mountain state receive fair representation...
...Rural politicians are in the saddle and they do not intend to dismount voluntarily...
...Yet this lofty constitutional mandate, handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, is honored only in the breach...
...Similar examples can be cited from all over the nation...
...This naturally benefits the rural producers of milk...
...It has not threatened the food supply of the country, because the tractor has replaced the mule and made it possible for one man on the farm to do the work previously accomplished by half-a-dozen...
...Why is it easier to pass a bill for farm subsidies than for housing subsidies in the cities...
...It also is a free and democratic nation...
...Never before in the nation's history has there been so steady a trek to metropolitan areas...
...Baltimore has 48 per cent of Maryland's people, yet only 29 per cent of the state's legislators...
...Mineral County, with 2,062 people, likewise has one senator...
...Can free institutions survive under such conditions...
...During World War II millions of men and women got their first taste of city life...
...This is when the legislature is turned loose with a meat cleaver, to chop the state into new Congressional districts...
...But it has threatened democracy in America, and this is certainly as important as the flow of farm produce...
...The bill would require each Congressional district to be compact and contiguous...
...Louis Post-Dispatch has Complained that urban voters will be left "with cut-rate ballots, which lose value as the population grows...
...Yet some House districts have 7,500 people, others 65,000...
...This denial exists in spite of the fact that it violates the Federal Constitution and the constitutions of many of the individual states...
...The cleaver descends in gerrymander strokes, since the farm counties run the show at Sacramento...
...In politics, never a realm particularly distinguished for RICHARD L. NEUBERGER, a state senator in the Oregon Legislature, where his wife is a member of the lower house, writes extensively of public affairs, conservation, and related subjects for many American publications, including The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, The Nation, Frontier, Harper's, and the St Louis Post' Dispatch...
...This means that many rural senators and representatives must be willing to abolish their own niches on the ballot...
...This is the kind of punishment that a politician understands and respects...
...There is hardly a state where the Constitution is not similarly thwarted...
...Under the U. S. Constitution the districts must be based on population...
...Paradoxically, these inequities tend to compound themselves because the 48 state legislatures have the power to set the boundaries of the country's Congressional districts...
...Some weird travesties on democracy have resulted...
...New habits and new allegiances had been formed...
...The innumerable restrictions heaped upon oleomargarine have been indicative of farm tyranny in legislative bodies...
...I serve in a legislature which has enacted a law that fixes the price of milk higher in Portland than in any other city on the Pacific Coast...
...Some states lose seats, other states gain...
...But in the 3rd Washington district, only 319,441 people are represented by a Congressman...
...Most of these migrants from the farms were comparatively young, and the call of youth to youth is an urgent one...
...The St...
...Almost invariably, all the blood is drawn from city folks...
...Its population has increased 53 per cent since 1940...
...The national House of Representatives has 435 members...
...And always it is the city which gets stuck...
...Yet today, well on toward two centuries after the troops of George III surrendered at Yorktown, the United States contains hundreds of lop-sided rotten boroughs where the vote of one man may possess 350 times the strength of that of his neighbor...
...They either were stationed in Army camps near large cities or they went to work in war plants...
...The House of Representatives is reapportioned every 10 years, when a census is taken...
...Mayor William F. Devin/)f Seattle has added, in an address to the National Municipal League, that city residents pay 90 per cent of the Federal, state, and local taxes levied in America and yet "have only a 25 per cent voice in the operation of state legislatures...
...They had never heard of such a thing...
...I sat in our senate listening to the reasons why rural mail carriers should be exempt from payment of the state gasoline tax...
...II America is now a nation of cities...
Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12
