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So it turns out that the state (commonwealth) of my birth is going to lose yet another congressional seat. Damnation. I remember that when I first learned about politics, Massachusetts has 12 seats in the U.S. House. After the next redistricting, it will have only nine, for a decrease of 25 percent in my lifetime. It's not as if the Bay State is any smaller, it's just that other parts of the country are bigger.
I wish the law was that states would have one congresscritter for each 500,000 residents, or something like that. Then we would just increase the number of representatives in the House instead of doing this stupid decennial reshuffling. Comments on that thought experiment are welcome (I certainly don't expect to see such radical change in what's left of my lifetime).
Interestingly, according to the map that goes with the previously mentioned story, the congressional losses and gains are all along the old Northeast/Midwest vs. South/West dynamic ... except for Louisiana, which is losing one seat. The head of the Census Bureau "would not speculate on whether the slow growth rate was related to the 2005 hurricanes," but you can draw your own conclusions.
I wish the law was that states would have one congresscritter for each 500,000 residents, or something like that. Then we would just increase the number of representatives in the House instead of doing this stupid decennial reshuffling. Comments on that thought experiment are welcome (I certainly don't expect to see such radical change in what's left of my lifetime).
Interestingly, according to the map that goes with the previously mentioned story, the congressional losses and gains are all along the old Northeast/Midwest vs. South/West dynamic ... except for Louisiana, which is losing one seat. The head of the Census Bureau "would not speculate on whether the slow growth rate was related to the 2005 hurricanes," but you can draw your own conclusions.
