At Liberty Law Blog, Derek Muller (Pepperdine): One Man, One Vote in Texas (discussing Evenwel v. Abbott, the Court's new apportionment case). From the introduction:
New litigation in Texas threatens to undermine a basic principle of our constitutional design: that our elected officials represent all of us. The President of the United States represents all of us—even if we didn’t vote for him; even if we didn’t vote at all, even if we were not yet born when he was elected, and even if we just moved here a few months ago. Our representatives in Congress, in the state legislature, and in local government do the same, within their respective jurisdictions. It would be a rather cramped view of representative government to think that representatives only represent those whose votes they won and nobody else’s.
The U.S. Constitution deeply embraced two principles of representation. The first is that representation could take different forms. Elected officials could represent the people within a state, or they could represent a state; they could be elected by the people, or by state legislatures, or by a group of (ideally) dispassionate electors. And the second is that representation of the people includes all the people. Even though states may have excluded women, or non-landholders, or children, or felons from the franchise, apportionment for the House of Representatives would occur after the U.S. Census enumerated the number of “persons” in each state. The Fourteenth Amendment enacted during Reconstruction was consistent with this understanding. And the several states embraced similar principles in their own constitutions and laws.
RELATED: David Gans comments on Evenwel here.
Posted at 6:42 AM