Reapportionment Quotes

There's no question about it, from a big picture standpoint, our No. 1 goal must remain reapportionment, because if we allow ourselves to get ruthlessly gerrymandered in reapportionment as we did last time, we can forget any reasonable chance of getting control of the U. S. House of Representatives until well into the next millennium.

If I was the leader of the House of Representatives, the first thing I would do is I would put in a very clean bill on reapportionment. And I would put a very clean bill in that says that corporations are not people.

Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders).

This new [redistricting] plan basically does away with the need for elections.

The current basis for apportionment—total population—creates an incentive for states to either encourage or tolerate illegal immigration.

How … can one person be given twice or ten times the voting power of another person ... merely because he lives in a rural area.

If a member of Congress doesn’t pay attention to process of reapportionment as the result of the census, he ends up being called “former Congressman.”

Every one of the state legislatures that sent delegates to Philadelphia was grossly malapportioned by any ‘one man, one vote’ standard, and the state conventions that ratified the Constitution were in every instance set up on the same rule of apportionment.

The right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.

I passed an entirely sleepless night. The iniquity of the bill and the disreputable means by which so partial and unjust a distribution had been effected, agitated me so that I could not close my eyes.

If legislators are allowed to continuously redistrict throughout the decade, you are going to have no way of using elections to remove unpopular officeholders because the lines will be redrawn to ensure their reelection.

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.

California is among several states that already have fought their way out from under partisan gerrymandering by taking line-drawing authority away from the Legislature.

Reapportionment is not friendly to a lot of communities and it hasn't been too friendly to mine.

The reapportionment of 2002 designed congressional districts that favored incumbents of both parties, leaving virtually no room for challengers to be elected. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only four incumbents lost to nonincumbents of the other party. In all, 96 percent of incumbents were re-elected. (It was only 90 percent in 1992 and 1982 after the previous reapportionments.)

Redistricting will determine the future control of Congress.

Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats?

Logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people in a State would elect a majority of that State’s legislators.

No one ever asserts that politics has no role in apportionment or redistricting.

Redistricting is the nastiest form of politics that there is.

Redistricting is one of the purest actions a legislative body can take.