Minority Rule in the House of Representatives

The other day I wrote about the tyranny of the minority in the United States Senate. Sadly, it's also true in the House of Representatives.

Republicans in next year's Congress, the 113th, will hold 234 of the 435 seats, or 54%. That must mean Republican House candidates that they won the majority of the votes cast, right?

Wrong. Democratic House candidates won 50.5% of the national vote, but took only 46% of the seats. How is this completely undemocratic outcome possible? Two reasons: incumbency and gerrymandering.

Because so many state legislatures were controlled by Republicans in 2010, they controlled the redistricting process. They redrew the lines to give themselves more seats in Congress in a process called gerrymandering. It was particularly egregious in North Carolina, where Democratic House candidates received 51% of the vote, but got only 27% of the seats.


As Republicans and Democrats negotiate over the "fiscal cliff," both sides are claiming that they won decisive political victories. Eight-five percent of House Republicans won re-election with 55% of the vote, with more than half winning more than 60%.

Republicans say this means voters are demanding they carry through on campaign promises. They are wrong: what voters really want is for Congress to do their job and stop screwing around.

Most House members win in "landslides" because their districts are gerrymandered. Running against an incumbent is such a losing proposition that opponents are nearly always unqualified sacrificial goats, placed on the ballot in the hope that the incumbent commits an unpardonable gaffe on the scale of Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment.

But even that doesn't always help. Tennessee Republican Congressman Scott DesJarlais is a doctor who claims to be a pro-life family-values conservative. A month before the election it came out that he had affairs with six coworkers and patients (!) and told one of them to get an abortion. Oh, and he and his ex-wife had two abortions. And this guy still won by 18.5 percent!


Results like this show quite clearly that winning any single election says nothing about what the voters want or think about the positions candidates espouse. Winning one particular race only means that you got more votes than the other guy, and that can be for any reason. But the biggest reasons are incumbency and district boundaries.

Ohio is a particularly blatant example of gerrymandering. John Boehner appears to think he won his district by 98% because the voters agree with everything he says. The fact is, he ran unopposed but only got 248,378 votes, the lowest vote total in an Ohio district. A Democrat, Marcia Fudge, ran unopposed in Ohio's 11th district but she got 100% of the vote, with 258,359 votes cast: 4% more than Boehner. Other districts had as many as 368,474 votes, almost 50% more than Boehner's district. Yet the population is supposed to be equal in all districts.

Although Obama won the state 50.1% to Romney's 48.2%, Ohio is sending four Democrats and 12 Republicans to Washington in January. In contested races Democrats won by margins from 42% to 50%; Republicans won by far more meager margins of 4% to 27%. How is that possible? Because the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature packed all the Democrats into four districts. (Pennsylvania is in a similar situation.)

What does John Boehner owe the people in his district that didn't vote for him? What does he owe the people in the rest of Ohio? What does he owe the people in the other 49 states?

Republicans need to get over this idea that they represent only the people that vote for them or donate to their campaigns. If one of Mr. Boehner's constituents was having a problem getting Social Security or veteran's benefits, I am absolutely certain he would help them get it fixed, regardless of who they voted for in the last election.

The legislative process should work the same way. Boehner should take into account the needs and opinions of everyone he represents, and that's not just the people in his gerrymandered Republican district. As speaker of the House, he is in line for the presidency. He therefore represents everyone in the country, and has to consider broader electoral results when formulating national policy.

The fact is, 98% of the people who voted for Mr. Boehner won't be affected by the president's compromise proposal on taxes. In the 2012 election cycle Boehner received at least $11.8 million in campaign donations, almost all of it from outside his district, almost all of it from people who will be affected by the president's compromise proposal on taxes.

Does Boehner really think he owes those donors more consideration than the rest of the people in the country?