Franke: Reapportionment
by Mark Franke
The Indiana General Assembly’s special session appears to be over, having voted down a mid-decade congressional reapportionment proposal. The legislature is required to reapportion after each decennial census but not more often, although nothing prevents more frequent efforts other than their fiscal and political costs.
Despite the heavy-handed involvement of Donald Trump in Indiana’s recent reapportionment process, he didn’t create this mess. It has been going on for most of our republic’s life. Establishing a governmental structure that was truly representative of the entire people while not being unduly influenced by special interest groups was the Founders’ goal.
In the debates leading to the Constitution’s ratification, James Madison warned against the unhealthy influence of what he called “factions.” By that he didn’t mean broad based, organized political parties, something several decades in America’s future. Instead, he was referring to special interest groups that could wield disproportionate influence over public decision-making.
Madison argued that the only way to combat a powerful faction is with competing factions. Factions would keep each other in check through representative democracy. This would occur at several levels including the most basic one — election to the House of Representatives.
The original constitutional language called for a congressman for each 30,000 citizens as a target, achieving the ideal of the House of Representatives being closest to the people and their needs. These were to be truly local elections, with candidates known to many of their voters. This worked for a while, until the population grew so fast that the House was becoming unmanageable. The decennial reapportionment was also becoming politically unmanageable, with congressional gridlock in apportioning House seats among the states after the 1910 census. Congressional gridlock; imagine that.
That was resolved by capping House membership at 435 with the creation of electoral districts left to the states. A simple system, except for the fact that everything today is an opportunity for a political battle in a nation that seems to split 51/49 on every issue. Enter Donald Trump.
Of course the anti-Trump crowd saw his demand for Indiana reapportionment as a naked power grab. It was hard to justify why a state where approximately 40 percent of the voters who chose a Democrat candidate should have no representatives in Indiana’s nine-person delegation.
They made a good case, philosophically at least. What didn’t come out was that Mr. Trump is not the original sinner in this morality play. He was merely following an age-old political gambit, albeit in his bull-in-a-China shop manner. His political calculus likely went something like this: Democrat controlled states have redrawn House districts to minimize Republic election victories. If I don’t respond in kind, I will be unfairly denied a legislative majority in the next Congress.
His reason for thinking this, assuming I have psychoanalyzed him correctly, can be seen by looking just to west to Illinois. Only three of its 17 congressmen are Republican while the 2024 election gave 47 percent of the vote to Republican candidates.
California, where Governor Newsom vows to retaliate against Trump’s reapportionment antics, is another gerrymandered state based on its delegation. Only nine of its 52 representatives are Republican although the party received nearly 40 percent of the congressional votes.
The case of the New England states is even more egregious. There is not a single Republican congressman from these six states. Maybe Trump was just applying a “New England rule” to Indiana’s delegation.
Rolling up the data to the national level, however, everything looks copacetic. Republicans captured 51 percent of the national congressional ballot and have just under 51 percent of the House seats. What could go wrong with that?
This: Congressmen do not represent the entire United States but a limited district within their state. Defining these limited districts is not a simple mathematical exercise in objectivity. It is a political process, in that term’s most positive and most negative meanings.
Let’s just call it what it is — politics, as usual. It is one of those unfortunate side effects of a governmental system built to be run by imperfect human beings and not by angels, to call on James Madison one more time. No constitution, no matter how well written, can prevent partisanship from overriding patriotism.
Maybe the prophet Hosea said it best, in his chastisement of a hypocritical and short-sighted Israel. “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7 NKJV). We know what happened to the northern kingdom just a few decades later. They are not called the Ten Lost Tribes without reason.
When we reduce everything to winning the next election, we cheapen the ideals of the Founding Fathers as handed down to us through the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence and the practical roadmap of the Constitution.
If this ultra-partisanship keeps up, the whirlwind can’t be far off.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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