A first look at the demographics of the 115th Congress

Roll Call: Party Diversity Gap to Remain in 115th.

The Hill: 115th Congress will be most racially diverse in history.

From ATTN: How to Make Your Congressman Listen to You

Useful advice - in a series of tweets.

- Click here for the article.

A sample:

Are you noticing a pattern here? The staff are the ones who run the ground game for Congress. Work on helping them understand and learn.

Because, if the staff knows you, when they have a question about a piece of legislation or amendment, they will be the one you call.

From the Texas Tribune: Latino Voters Sue to Bolster Influence on Electing Judges

For our look at civil rights, elections, and the judiciary - among other things.

Should Texas' top courts be elected in single member districts?

- Click here for the article.

The state’s most powerful courts don’t exactly resemble the population outside of their chambers.

Though Latinos make up more than a quarter of the state’s voting-age population, just one — Justice Eva Guzman — sits on the nine-member Texas Supreme Court. The same goes for the nine-member Court of Criminal Appeals, where Judge Elsa Alcalapresides.
Seeking to bolster their chronically sparse representation, seven Latino voters are suing Texas, arguing that its longtime method of electing statewide judges dilutes the voting power of a rapidly growing racial group.

“This is a very important case,” said Jose Garza, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last week in a U.S. district court in Corpus Christi. “Latino voters don’t have a say in who gets elected to the Texas Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals.”

For more than a century, judges on the state’s high courts run have run in at-large partisan elections, vying for votes across the state. They serve staggered six-year terms. In a bright-red state like Texas, that voting system yields staunchly Republican courts, limiting election drama to primary races.

The plaintiffs — six voters in Nueces County and one in El Paso — argue that the current system prevents Latinos from choosing the candidates they prefer. Latino candidates would more consistently nab places on the courts, they suggest, if Texas carved up the courts geographically, creating single-member districts.

From ProPublica: Old Debts, Fresh Pain: Weak Laws Offer Debtors Little Protection

We're reading through some of Federalist #10 in GOVT 2305 this week and this story reminded me of some of the paper's content. In it Madison argues that political conflict ultimately stems from self interest. We take positions on issues based on how they impact us. Policy tends to be set by which ever side has a majority - so the interests of the majority will be most likely be served.

He offers this little tidbit:

Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.

Based on this, its fair to say that the interests of creditors are far more represented in the legislature that the interests of debtors. The piece in ProPublica illustrates this. It concerns a law that allows wages to be garnished for credit card debt. It's worth considering whether the law presents the best and fairest way to handle credit card debt - or merely one that best secures the interests of the most powerful groups in Congress and those that support them.

- Click here for the article.

The federal law regulating garnishment harkens back to 1968, when the financial life of Americans was much simpler. Time has eroded what even then were modest protections. The law barred creditors from taking any wages from the very poorest of workers, but used a calculation based on the minimum wage to identify them. Since the federal minimum wage hasn't kept pace with inflation, today, only workers earning about $11,000 annually or less— a wage below the poverty line— are protected. The law also allows collectors to garnish a quarter of a debtor's after-tax pay, an amount that government surveys show is plainly unaffordable for many families.

And the law is silent on perhaps the most punishing tactic of collectors: It doesn't prohibit them from cleaning out debtors' bank accounts. As a result, a collector can't take more than 25 percent of a debtor's paycheck, but if that paycheck is deposited in a bank, all of the money in the account can be grabbed to pay down the debt.
State laws, while often more comprehensive than the federal rules, vary widely. Only a handful, for instance, automatically protect a minimum amount of funds in a debtor's account.

When garnishment protections do exist, the burden is usually on debtors to figure out if and how the laws protect their assets.

From The Dish:What Really Doomed Cantor? Ctd

This post should help shine light on what I want you to do with your essay.

- Click here for it.

It's yet another look at why Eric Cantor lost the primary this week, but this time it looks at what issues were more important to the voters in his district as opposed to voters across the nation.

Notice what this graph is telling us:



Nationally, the dominant issue is jobs and the economy, and it has been that way for the past two electoral cycles. As majority leader, Cantor focused on these issues - as he should have - since they were what his party overall had to concentrate on.

But the voter sin his district were focused on spending/debt and Obamacare (but not so much on immigration). Cantor obviously did not see that while his opponent did. That's why Cantor lost - if true. He lost touch with what was important to voters - or more specifically Republican primary voters - his district.

Think about this as you develop your paper topic. Are the elected officials on the same page as their constituents?

From the Washington Post: What the U.S. map would look like if state size matched population

Click here for the article.

Texas is still Texas, but Rhode Island is now Wyoming and Alaska is California.

The demographic consequences of gerrymandering

Here's visual evidence that gerrymandering has led to substantive differences in the racial composition of Democratic and Republican congressional districts. The typical Democratic district has twice as many Hispanics, Blacks and Asians and about 1/3rd fewer Whites. This helps explain what drives differences between the parties in the House of Representatives. They represent substantively "slices of the country."

What's more, the votes they cast are subject to review by primary voters in their districts. Since primary voters are more extreme ideologically than general elections voters, representatives must placate those voters if they want to stay in office. The Dish argues that this points out that gerrymandering incentivises members of Congress to polarize.

More evidence that the Senate is not a democratic institution

This is a point we make a lot in 2305 (and it applies to 2306 as well). The Senate was designed to be removed from the direct preferences of the electorate, which was done partly by connecting it to states which are then treated as equal political entities. The six year overlapping terms does much of the rest.

So it an undemocratic institution, which some commentary about the gun control vote noted. Senators from smaller states had more sway over the amendments tha those from larger states.

Here's one take:

The Manchin-Toomey bill received 54 aye votes and 46 nay votes. That is to say, a solid majority of senators voted for it. In most legislative bodies around the world, that would have been enough. But it wasn’t a sufficient supermajority for the U.S. Senate.

Of the senators from the 25 largest states, the Manchin-Toomey legislation received 33 aye votes and 17 nay votes — an almost 2:1 margin, putting it well beyond the 3/5ths threshold required to break a filibuster. But of the senators from the 25 smallest states, it received only 21 aye votes and 29 nay votes.

Another points out that the Senators who voted for the amendments represented almost 2/3rds of the population:

If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure.

In a legislative body that didn’t give sparsely populated rural states the same representation as densely populated urban ones—and in which a minority of representatives lacked the power to block debate indefinitely—those kinds of numbers would be more than enough to pass something like the background check proposal.

A third provides graphical evidence of the ratio between the largest and smallest states over time:

And the smallest share of the electorate that can comprise a majority in the Senate:

From Off the Kuff: "one person, one vote" upheld

Charles Kuffner points to a story mentioning that the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the one person one vote rule established in several early 1960s Supreme Court cases, most notably Baker v. Carr.

Since the 1960s, the court has said that election districts should be equal in size under the so-called one person, one vote rule. Under this rule, U.S. representatives, state legislators, city council members and county board members usually represent about the same number of people.

But the court had not ruled directly on whether these districts should be counted based on the number of persons who live there or on the number of citizens who are eligible to vote.

. . . A conservative group called the Project on Fair Representation has led the challenge to the Voting Rights Act in a case from Alabama. Its lawyers filed a separate appeal in a Texas case that urged the justices to revisit the one person, one vote rule and say that only eligible voters should be counted.

Their lawyers argued that because of “changing immigration patterns,” the standard method of counting all residents shifts political power “away from rural communities to urban centers with high concentrations of residents who are ineligible to vote.”

They cited a case from Irving, Texas, where the City Council had been pressed to redraw its districts so as to create one with a Latino majority. Under the new plan, the council was elected from six districts, all of which had about 31,000 people, based on a census tally. But the Latino district had only 11,200 eligible voters, compared with 20,600 eligible voters in a neighboring district. This “stark disparity” means that the voters in the first district have nearly twice as much clout as those in the second, they said.

Keith Lepak and several other city voters sued, arguing that counting all people, including noncitizens, diluted their votes and denied them the equal protection of the laws promised in the 14th Amendment. They lost before a federal judge and the 5thCircuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court turned down the appeal Monday in Lepak vs. City of Irving.

Defenders of the city’s plan noted that the 14thAmendment says representatives to Congress shall be allocated by “counting the whole number of persons in each state.”  

From the Chron: Houston region may be nation’s most diverse, but congressional delegation isn’t

A year ago the Houston Chronicle ran a story detailing how the local area has emerged as the nation's "most ethnically diverse large metropolitan area." This is especially true for area suburbs:

Two suburbs - Missouri City and Pearland - have become even more diverse than the city of Houston. Other suburbs aren't far behind.

These findings are from a report released Monday by Rice University researchers, based on an analysis of census data from 1990, 2000 and 2010.

"We are a little United Nations," Pearland Mayor Tom Reid said. "You go to one of our neighborhoods, and there will be a person from Nigeria living next to somebody from India, living next to somebody from Mexico and somebody from Louisiana."

Today the paper runs a story pointing out that this diversity is not reflected in the racial composition of the Houston area delegation to Congress. They also claim that this is deliberate:

Despite the fact that the Houston region is a model of 21st century America, the congressional delegation is stuck in the 1970s. Of the 12 lawmakers who represent a piece of the Houston area, only one has Tejano roots (Republican Bill Flores of Bryan) and two are African Americans (Democrats Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston). There are no Asian American representatives, even though the census reflects a rapid growth in the area’s Asian American population.

Nine of the 12 House members — 75 percent — are non-Hispanic white, known in Texas political circles as “Anglo.” Those include eight Republicans and one Democrat (Gene Green of Houston).

Why is the delegation’s composition so out of step with the demographic changes of the region? Blame the Texas Legislature and the federal courts. The Texas Legislature drew a map that minimized the voting power of Houston-area Latinos in order to maximize the voting power of Republicans. And it divided diverse Fort Bend County in an attempt to preserve a safe seat for Republican Pete Olson of Sugar Land while packing as many minority voters as possible into the Harris County-dominated district of Al Green.

Also, two “Anglos” are representing districts that are majority Latino: Gene Green and Blake Farenthold, a Corpus Christi Republican whose district includes the Coastal Bend and the southwestern edges of the Houston metro area.

The federal courts are responsible in that they approved an interim map that formalized the Legislature’s plan that minimized minority representation in Southeast Texas and the Coastal Bend.

Does the 113th Congress really mirror the American public?

Of course not.

Whose interests really matter to legislators?

According to a recent study, state legislators think their constituents are more conservaties than they really are, which makes representation a bit problematic:

Broockman and Skovron find that legislators consistently believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are. This includes Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. But conservative legislators generally overestimate the conservatism of their constituents by 20 points. “This difference is so large that nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country,” Broockman and Skovron write. This finding held up across a range of issues. Here, for example, are their findings for health care and same-sex marriage:

The X axis is the district’s actual views, and the Y axis their legislators’ estimates of their views. The thin black line is perfect accuracy, the response you’d get from a legislator totally in tune with his constituents. Lines above it would signify the politicians think the district more liberal than it actually is; if they’re below it, that means the legislators are overestimating their constituents’ conservatism. Liberal legislators consistently overestimate opposition to same-sex marriage and universal health care, but only mildly. Conservative politicians are not even in the right ballpark.

A commentators tries to understand why:

The study authors don't really get into why. But here's one theory: The overall political views of a district are less important for policymaking than the organized political groups in a district, and conservatives have since the 1970s pursued a strategy of robust organizing within states in the service of pushing conservative policies. In recent years, anti-abortion groups in particular have worked to lobby state legislators, vastly outstripping abortion-rights groups on the ground in state after state and creating a powerful constituency for change in a socially conservative direction.

Matthews says the data show that "epistemic closure on the right is real," but I don't think it's that conservatives are out of touch with their constituents and unwilling to listen to others, so much as as that they are in touch with a highly organized infrastructure of pressure groups dedicated to lobbying them to vote even more conservatively than their overall constituency might wish. Liberals have never been able to (or, more commonly, sought to) match the extent of state-by-state organizing and statehouse lobbying of conservative groups and causes, even though comparatively small investments can reap major rewards in such environments.

In short, conservative groups have done a better job organizing than liberal groups. This fits a theory we pursue in different parts of this class. While democracy is understood as being rule by the people, and democratic institutions are made accountable to the electorate, organized groups are better able to send clear messages to elected representatives. Its not the people who rule, but the people who are members of better organized groups.

Why aren't there more journalists - and other media types - in Congress?

Good question asked in class today. I do not know.

Media people are hired by folks in Congress and the executive branch to face other media people, but they do not actually hold the office generally. Again, I don't know why.

We discussed this after looking at the graph below on the occupations members of Congress hold. I tried to explain why there are so many lawyers in Congress and mentioned that the principal-agent model of representation suggests that lawyers might be worth "employing" as a representative since lawyers are used to dealing with laws - its what they do. That's not a fully satisfactory answer though.

I do know that lawyers firms and law schools are fertile places places for political activity and recruitment. They are terrific places to tap into political networks that can lead to being recruited to run for office. The same may hold true for business people.

It does occur to me that we probably don't know enough about why certain occupations are over and under represented in Congress. This certainly matters for effective representation - there are 108 business people and 1 union representative in the House. That explains a lot. If anyone reads this that knows of relevant research. let me know what's out there - thanks.

The 113th Congress in a graph

From BusinessWeek.

We will be discussing the concept of representation soon and try to figure out how a Congress that does not have the same breakdown as the US as a whole can purport to represent it. Almost 1/3rd of the members are lawyers, and just over 20% are women. How does that influence what it does?

The chart does not show how many are millionaires, but as a percentage, it is substantively more than the general population. How does that impact the decisions they make?

There are no moderate representatives

One graph in the story refered to in the previous post deserves to be highlighted since it puts in a nutshell not only the polarized nature of Congress, but the fact that members of Congress do not represent the interests of moderates, only those of the extreme - who happen to be primary voters by the way. This is based on data from California, but there is little reason to expect it to not apply elsewhere - here in Texas for example.



Notice that the no member of Congress lies directly under the peak of either the typical Republican  or Democratic voter. This does suggest that we rethink who or what members of Congress actually represent. The traditional story - that they represent their constituents - clearly does not explain a thing.

The article this was pulled from costs money to access, but here is a link to it anyway.

"party trumps constituency"

I may be reading this summary of the study wrong, but it seems to imply that members of Congress - or at least candidates - are more responsive to their parties than to their constituents.

If so, that suggests that political parties have upset the entire purpose (as defined by the Constitution) of the House of Representatives.

The NYT: Which Millionaire Are You Voting For?

The NYT points out that policies aside, Democratic and Republican candidates for office each tend to be very well off. Very legislators on the national and state level have blue collar backgrounds - according to this story 3% of state legislators have working class backgrounds. Does this mean that legislators have little understanding of the circumstances and needs of the working class? This question gets to the heart of democratic representation.

A quote from the story:

If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.

And these trends don’t stop at the federal level. Since the 1980s, the number of state legislators whose primary occupations are working-class jobs has fallen from 5 percent to 3 percent. In City Councils, fewer than 10 percent of members have blue-collar day jobs. Everywhere we look in government, almost no one with personal experience in working-class jobs has a seat at the table.

Their absence, moreover, has real consequences. Lawmakers from different classes tend to bring different perspectives to public office. John Boehner is fond of saying that he’s a small-business man at heart and that “It gave me a perspective on our country that I’ve carried with me throughout my time in public service.” And he’s right. Former businesspeople in government tend to think like businesspeople, former lawyers tend to think like lawyers, and (the few) former blue-collar workers tend to think like blue-collar workers.
The author has an interesting book coming out: “White-Collar Government: How Class-Imbalanced Legislatures Distort Economic Policy-Making in the United States.”

Who represents future generations?

Here's a provocative read that relates to both 2301 and 2302. We are a representative democracy under the theory that people ought to be able to consent to the rules that will impact us, but many decisions made today really only have an impact - good or bad - on future generations.

How are their interests best represented?

Does Congress really represent the American people?

The Washington Post reports that a far higher percentage of members of Congress are millionaires than the general population. As we consider elections and the nature pf representation, is it proper to wonder if Congress can in fact make decisions that benefit the general population if it does not look like the general population?

Read the full report here.

The average American’s net worth has dropped 8 percent during the past six years, while members of Congress got, on average, 15 percent richer, according to a New York Times analysis of financial disclosure. The median net worth of members of Congress is about $913,000, compared with about $100,000 for the country at large, the Times’ analysis found.

This wealth disparity between lawmakers and the people they represent seems to be continually growing. Nearly half of Congress — 249 members — are millionaires, while only 5 percent of American households can make the same claim.

Even among the super rich, members of Congress fare better than other wealthy Americans. While the net worth of the richest 10 percent of Americans has remained stagnant since 2004, lawmakers’ net worth has seen double-digit growth, the Times reports.

Members of the House have fared especially well. From 1984 to 2009, the average net worth of the 435 House reps more than doubled, from $280,000 to $725,000, not including home equity, according to a Washington Post analysis of financial disclosures.

And while lawmakers in the “people’s house” grew significantly richer, the people they represent became slightly poorer, with the average wealth of an American household dropping from $20,600 to $20,500 over the same time period, the Post reports.

This growing disparity may be due, in part, to the rising cost of campaigning, which may deter less-affluent citizens from seeking public office.

Why are the self employed largely ingnored in jobs bills?

From Democracy Journal. Perhaps it has to do with their political weakness. Its an unfortunate, but readily understood story. People do not get support because they do beneficial things, but because they connected:

As the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Kauffman Foundation have recently reported, businesses under one-year old—startups—have created an average of three million new jobs each year for 30 years, more than the net job creation of the whole economy. A big proportion of those jobs are by self-employed entrepreneurs who don’t have any employees. Each year some 22 million Americans file Schedule C to report self-employment income, two million of them for the first time. Half of these filers report family adjusted gross income of less than $50,000.

And yet, despite contributing millions of jobs to the U.S. economy, such businesses are all but ignored by policy-makers. They have no associations or lobbies. They are largely left out of the agenda of the President’s Start-up program, which focuses only on rapidly growing, often older firms, which can take venture capital investment and pay handsome returns. Small business groups focus on the agendas of small firms while the Chamber of Commerce and others focus largely on the perceived needs of big businesses. States still focus on luring large, established firms.