[EL] DC House Voting Rights Bills -- Was: Supreme Court Summarily Rejects Constitutional Challenge to the Size of the House of Representatives

[Mark Scarberry]

Shame on me for leaving out the SSRN link to my article:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=1345744. Download early and often!

Mark

Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Mark Scarberry <
mark.scarberry at pepperdine.edu> wrote:

> I wouldn't say that the DC House Voting Rights bills (purporting to grant
> the District a voting member in the House) went nowhere.I wrote on this
> back in 2009.
>
> In 2007, bills introduced in the House and Senate nearly were sent to the
> President (with cloture on the Senate bill failing by only three votes).
> But Pres. Bush would have vetoed either of them on the basis that they were
> unconstitutional. .
>
> The bill was reintroduced by Sen. Lieberman in January 2009 as Senate Bill
> 160. Cloture was invoked  62-34. Pres. Obama had supported it as a Senator
> and would have signed it, at least if it had been a clean bill. Sen. Ensign
> succeeded in amending the bill to add a poison pill provision that would
> have stripped DC of much of its power to enact gun control regulation and
> that would have repealed most of the existing DC gun regulations. The bill
> then passed in the Senate by a vote of 61-37. I presume the Democrats who
> voted to pass it thought the poison pill could be stripped out in the House
> and then the resulting clean bill might pass in the Senate. Instead, the
> bill died in the House.
>
> See my article with a long title:
>
> Historical Considerations and Congressional Representation for the
> District of Columbia: Constitutionality of the D.C. House Voting Rights
> Bill in Light of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment and the History of
> the Creation of the District, 60 Ala. L. Rev. 783, 785-88 (2009).
>
> I predicted that the bill would become law, or as much "law" as any
> thoroughly unconstitutional statute could be. As noted above, I thought the
> Democrats would be able to strip out the poison pill provision. But, as
> also noted above, it died in the House.
>
> I supported (and support) the District having a voting member in the
> House, but the bill was not the way to do accomplish that goal.
>
> Mark
>
> Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
> Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
>
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 11:55 AM, Adam Morse <ahmorse at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There have been relatively recent proposals to vary the size of the House
>> a small amount--around the 2000 redistricting, I think, there was a
>> proposal to give Utah an extra seat at a point when it had the highest
>> average number of voters per district, paired with a seat for the District
>> of Columbia.  The idea was that it would provide partisan balance (adding
>> one Democratic and one Republican seat), while addressing
>> underrepresentation.  Under the proposal, the size of the House would have
>> gone back to its current size after the next census.  Unsurprisingly, the
>> proposal went nowhere.
>>
>> --Adam Morse
>>
>
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