Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Texas Apportionment

I'm going to be honest and say that I probably won't do much remembering of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s contributions to American civil rights this Monday.  I'll be more focused on not having to go to class.  I'll be thankful that I'll get time to process the fire hose of information I seem to drinking from every day.

Texas has an interesting problem right now, redistricting their congressional districts.  The map their legislature drew didn't pass the scrutiny of some people in the state.  They claim that the new growth, and resulting four seats, are due to an increase in the Latino population.  Since Latinos tend to be more aligned with the Democrats, the new districts should favor the Democrats.  Of course, their Republican majority legislature didn't draw the lines that way.  The US Supreme Court said they couldn't draw their lines that way, since it disenfranchised the Latino vote, and Texas apparently has a history of disenfranchising minority groups.  So, the  Supreme Court empowered a lower court to fix the map.  The lower court took it upon themselves to completely redraw the entire map.  Clearly, the power of map-drawing belongs to the state legislature, not the judicial system.  So, they can't do that.  And now there's a big mess, and time is running out for Texas to select its representatives.  That's another reason I think that we would have a smaller problem with a smaller House.  redistricting due to new seats would happen less often.

I would propose that the number of representatives in the House be tied to the number of senators.  If we had 2.5 times as many representatives as senators, moved up to an odd number, if necessary, we would have 251 representatives in the House.  I think this would provide enough to make the apportionment somewhat representative of the populations, and would keep the number of representatives small enough that they might get something done.  It would also reduce the amount of gerrymandering possible for congressional districts.  The breakdown would look something like this:

AL - 4
AR - 2
AZ - 5
CA - 30
CO - 4
CT - 3
FL - 15
GA - 8
IA - 3
IL - 10
IN - 5
KS - 2
KY - 4
LA - 4
MA - 5
MD - 5
MI - 8
MN - 4
MO - 5
MS - 2
NC - 8
NE - 2
NJ - 7
NM - 2
NV - 2
NY -16
OH - 9
OK - 3
OR - 3
PA - 10
SC - 4
TN - 5
TX - 20
UT - 2
VA - 6
WA - 5
WI - 5
WV - 2
AK, DE, HI, ID, ME, MT, NH, ND, RI, SD, VT, WY - 1