The U.S. Constitution requires, in Article 1, Section 2, that representation in the U.S. House of Representatives be “apportioned among the several states” on the basis of a national census which was to take place every ten years. I suspect just about everyone knows this.
And yet, after the 1910 census, the mainly rural supporters of Prohibition delayed reapportionment for 20 years because they did not want to give up seats to the nation’s cities, teeming with alcohol drinking immigrants mainly from Germany and Italy. Andrew Sinclair in Prohibition: The Era of Excess, writes:
The refusal of Congress after the Census of 1910 to give the cities more seats in the House of Representatives was a frank confession by the country members that they wished to continue ruling the cities. Reapportionment of seats in the House was postponed until after the Census of 1930, in defiance of the Constitution. The oversight was partially due to the pressure of the dry lobby, which otherwise made so much of the need to obey the Constitution and its Eighteenth Amendment. (p. 91)
Oh, I know, there are better examples — and much more current ones — of those who govern us failing to follow the law and paying no price for it. But this just strikes as a perfect example of what it means when political expediency (and what else is there in Mordor on the Potomac?) and the will to power annihilate all other considerations. The census, “enshrined” in the Constitution, is simply an inconvenience when it stands in the way of achieving a political goal. Or making a tawdry moral point.
6:06 am on October 6, 2009
