Congressional District

The 435 congressional districts in the United States resemble a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. In fact, the dual processes of reapportionment and redistricting —adjusting the districts after each ten-year census —have aptly been described as “jigsaw politics.”

The districts come in all shapes and sizes. Some are rich, some are poor. Some are crowded, some are sparsely settled. Some in one area have little in common with those in another area, except that they are all the foundation blocks of the American system of representative democracy.

Congressional districts have physical shapes, yet they are not about geography but about people. As such, the districts have been the subject of some of the most fiercely fought political battles in U.S. history. In politics, people mean votes, and votes mean power. And power is at the heart of more than two centuries of haggling over where the district lines are drawn to benefit this or that party, this or that rural or urban area, this or that racial group, and even this or that individual member of Congress.

Under the Constitution as interpreted since 1964 by the Supreme Court, each congressional district must be as nearly equal as possible in population to every other district in that state. This requirement ensures adherence to the principle of one person, one vote. Computer technology has helped the states to meet the Court's rigid mathematical guidelines.

Even in the most heavily populated state, California, the districts drawn after the 1990 census showed remarkably little variance in population—from 573,082 in the First District, north of San Francisco, to 573,203 in the Fifty-second District, on the Mexican border. Yet equality of population does not always tell the full story, here or elsewhere.

Debate still rages about the legality of political gerrymandering, the artful drawing of district lines to benefit a particular party or candidate. Until 1986 the Supreme Court avoided this particular “political thicket,” considering it a matter for the elected branches, not the courts. But that year the Court ruled in Davis v. Bandemer, a case originating in Indiana, that [Page p100]such gerrymandering is indeed subject to constitutional review. However, it let stand the districting plan drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature at issue in the case.

Three years later, the Court declined to become involved in a challenge to California's districting plan, which was widely regarded as a textbook example of political gerrymandering. The map based on the 1980 census was the legacy of Phillip Burton, a Democratic representative who served from 1964 to 1983. It featured several oddly shaped districts, drawn neither compactly nor with respect to community boundaries, but all with nearly equal populations. As one writer described it, “Burton carefully stretched districts from one Democratic enclave to another—sometimes joining them with nothing but a bridge, a stretch of harbor, or a spit of land… avoiding Republicans block for block and household for household.”

Adopted by the Democratic-controlled state legislature, the Burton plan helped California Democrats to gain six House seats in the 1982 elections, prompting a lawsuit from one of the minority Republicans. By a 6–3 vote the Supreme Court refused in 1989 to overturn the Burton plan, agreeing with a lower court that California Republicans had not proven a general pattern of exclusion from the political process.

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