Reapportionment Act of 1929
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 (ch. 28, 46 Stat. 21, 2 U.S.C. § 2a, enacted 1929-06-18) was a combined census and reapportionment bill passed by the United States Congress which established a permanent method for apportioning a constant 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives according to each census. The bill neither repealed nor restated the requirements of the previous apportionment acts — that districts be contiguous, compact, and equally populated.
It was not clear if these requirements were still in effect until the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the matter of Wood v. Broom, 287 U.S. 1 (1932) that the provisions of each apportionment act affected only the apportionment for which they were written. Thus the size and population requirements, last stated in the Apportionment Act of 1911, expired immediately with the enactment of the subsequent Apportionment Act.
The (supposedly) permanent Act of 1929 gave little direction concerning congressional districting. It merely established a system in which House seats would be reallocated to states which have shifts in population. The lack of recommendations concerning districts had several significant effects.
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 allowed states to draw districts of varying size and shape. It also allowed states to abandon districts altogether and elect at least some representatives at large, which several states chose to do, including New York, Illinois, Washington, Hawaii, and New Mexico. For example, in the 88th Congress (in the early 1960s) 22 of the 435 representatives were elected at-large.
In the 1960's, beginning with Baker V. Carr the Supreme Court ruled that House Members must be elected from equally populous single member districts.
Historical Context
Save one exception (1840), the House of Representatives had been enlarged by various degrees from sixty five members in 1788 to 105 members in 1790, 240 members in 1830 and then to 423 members by 1910 [1] [2]. In 1790 and the early 1800's the seats were apportioned among the states using the method of Jefferson. In 1840 the House was reduced to 232 members by the incoming Whig party that had ousted the Jacksonian Democrats. From 1840 through 1860 the House increased minimally as new states were admitted to the union. No particular apportionment method was used during this period and the redistribution of seats was highly political. As the 14th amendment dramatically increased the apportionment population of the souther states following the civil war (black population fully counted as opposed to 3/5ths) a major increase in seats was needed to retain more political power in the northern states. Hence, the House was enlarged by 50 seats (21%) such that the 1970 apportionment was based on a house size of 292. From 1870 through 1910 the membership of the House was calculated in such a way as to insure that no state lost a seat due to shifts in apportionment population. In 1880 the provisions for equally populated contiguous and compact single member districts was made a part of the decennial reapportionment act and this was repeated in the reapportionment acts following the 1890, 1900, and 1910 censuses.
In 1920 the Republicans removed the Democrats from power taking the presidency and both houses of the Congress. Due to a large rural to urban shift in population from 1910 to 1920 the new Republican Congress (unconstitutionally) refused to reapportion the House of Representatives in the traditional fashion. The reapportionment of 1921 in the then traditional fashion would have increase the size of the House to 483 seats, but many members would have lost their seats due to the population shifts. As the Reapportionment act of 1929 did away with districts altogether, it was a solution to the problem of threatened Republican incumbency.
References
- ^ http://www.thirty-thousand.org "Thirty-Thousand.org"
- ^ "Fair Representation - Meeting the Ideal of One Man One Vote, Michael L. Balinski and H. Peyton Young