(No new seats for you! – promoted by Colorado Pols)
Texas is the big winner in the census bureau’s just released apportionment data…they will pick up 4 seats for 2012.
Ohio and New York are each losing two seats. Colorado holds steady with 7 congressional seats allotted to us.
Here is a link to all of the data:
http://2010.census.gov/2010cen…
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but why have textbooks when we can just use the bible
History, science, math (I can not remember the conversion for a cubit), poetry…. fiction
when the GOP is against family planning.
From the link given above:
Colorado has 5,044,928 people.
That works out to averages of:
720,704 per CD
144,141 per SD
77,614 per HD
I’ll be playing with this info rest of the day.
One to take note of is that the largest population gain in Texas is due to Hispanic growth.
Wonder how being known as “The Political Party that Killed the American DREAM” is going to go over with Republicans in two years.
California is a good model for Republican aspirations.
They talk about how it’s Republican states gaining seats. But they’re gaining them due to an increase in Democratic leaning voters.
Universal opinion from all sides of the political fence seem to be that this is one of the dumbest votes (and cruel and heartless and pick your adjective) to come from the Republicans this entire session and is going to come back to bite them in the ass in 2012.
They control the state governments in most of those states. They can take their extra seats and ensure yet another round of gerrymandered Republican-leaning seats, continuing to concentrate Democrats into 80-90% D districts.
article which was focusing on how this could affect the presidential election in 2012, not so much House districts, redrawing, et al.
It might be better for the GOP for the next 10 years, but the long-term demographics are not on their side.
and preach a steady social conservative message on anti-abortion issues to bring in the traditionally conservative Catholic dominant Hispanic vote. Just because they have a hate campaign towards Hispanics today doesn’t mean they can’t craft a clever message to catch the unwary in the future. Between the 2010 landslide in state legislatures and shifting of Congressional seats, Gerrymandering will insure a long beneficial environment for Republicans.
the Texas gerrymandering will be so very interesting — look for the new districts that resemble Mandelbrot sets.
You mean like CD2 or CD7?
CO-02 and CO-07 both serve communities of interest (i.e. their constituents have somewhat related interests) and are as compact as can be expected given the state requirement of following geopolitical boundaries where possible.
The Texas districts were redrawn mid-term in 2003 by Tom DeLay and the Texas GOP-controlled Lege. The districts there are drawn in long strips across vast lengths of the state, ignoring geopolitical boundaries as well as communities of interest. Most of them are drawn as ~60% Republican districts, often splitting small cities in half to break up Democratic majority regions.
There’s no doubt that Republicans are a majority in Texas, but the GOP delegation picked up 6 seats as a direct result of the gerrymander, flipping the Texas delegation from 17D-15R to 21R-11D, which is not representative of the state’s population. One of the districts, TX-23, was so badly gerrymandered on racial lines that the Supreme Court ruled it in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
An enterprising Democrat over at sister SoapBlox site The Swing State Project has already drawn the map for the Texas GOP.
He figures that, regardless of the GOP super-majority now controlling the Texas Lege, two of the four new seats will have to go to Hispanic minority populations due to Voting Rights Act requirements. This will split the gains between the GOP and Democrats. The DeLaymander of 2003 really skirted the edge of violating the VRA in order to maximize Republican gains; one of the districts crossed the line, and two others were on the edge.
I have to say that the number of people per seat is getting pretty high. It has more than tripled in the last 100 years. Isn’t it about time we added some more seats to Congress?
If we added 100 seats to Congress (535) we would only reduce the people/seat ratio down to 1990 levels.
Why stop at 100?
I say get us back the golden years of representation – 1920-1938.
And that’s the smallest number I think we should try for.
Of course, increasing the number of Representatives means finding more seats in the Capitol building. I don’t know what the current room is designed to hold – it could probably seat 569, since it has to host joint sessions of Congress once per year (at least 535, plus the non-voting Representatives). But I don’t know if it’s currently big enough to host an expanded joint session, or a larger delegation than 569…
And that brings us to the next restraint, which provides a convenient excuse to kill the deal: money. We’d have to spend money on a Capitol construction project, on the salaries of more Congress members, and on their staff.
I agree that the size of the current House Chamber may be an issue, but I don’t think that should stop us from what I see as strengthening our representative democracy. The Capitol can be expanded if necessary.
And additional salaries for Congressmen and staff seems like it would be fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things.
I’m just pointing out the excuses that will be used by various Congresscritters to say “no” without coming out and saying “I like the protected position I’m in”.