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, based on the census population figures. This requirement ensures adherence to the principle of one person, one vote. Computer technology has helped the states draw districts that meet the Court's rigid mathematical guidelines, which have become increasingly stringent.

This is something that state lawmakers in Pennsylvania learned the hard way after they redrew their congressional district map following the 2000 census. A federal district court ordered the map adjusted because of a population deviation that amounted to just nineteen people between the most and least populated districts—or an average of one person for each of the state's nineteen districts. Yet equality of population does not come close to telling 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 completely avoided this particular “political thicket,” as famed Justice Felix Frankfurter referred to all judicial intervention in redistricting in a 1946 opinion. Jurists considered the use of redistricting for partisan purposes to be a matter for the elected branches, not the courts. And as the most recent decisions on this subject indicate, most still do.

In its 1986 ruling in the case of Davis v. Bandemer, which involved a highly partisan state legislative district map drawn by Indiana Republicans, the Court found that political gerrymandering is subject to constitutional review. The decision left the door ajar for the Court to determine in the future that a partisan gerrymander is so patently unfair that it constitutes an assault of the rights of voters to equal protection under the law.

But even as it made its ruling, the Court let stand the districting plan at issue in the case. Further, in the more than two decades since, the judiciary has resisted overruling legislative [Page 112]district maps on strictly partisan grounds, or setting standards for when an egregious gerrymander might exist.

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