Not without the permission of the senate. But what was done last time we admitted a brace o’ states?
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And the President, presuming we don’t have the 2/3rd support in either.
Which, at least until MyPillow reinstalls trump in August, we’ve got all three for another few months.
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The old fashioned way: suppress the native american vote.
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Pretty easy these days.
Just match up your proposed map with the unvaccinated population, there’s your Red portion for gerrymandering.
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The problem being if they don’t do it basically right now it won’t be possible to expand the house in the next election because they won’t have time to settle the districts, and the republicans could just reapportion the house down to a smaller size before the larger size ever takes effect.
Reapportionment needs to happen though, the Wyoming rule (congressional district pop = smallest state pop) is the bare minimum. I’d honestly prefer they take that and double the reps/halve the pop per district at a minimum. They also need to set it to adjust automatically based on the census and that smallest size state.
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There are three parties in the senate: democrats, republicans, and the nation of joe manchin.
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Temporarily increased the size of the House by one rep each for Alaska and Hawaii until the next reapportionment, the census for which took place the following year.
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I assume that was written into the bill admitting the two states?
Yeah, I’m sure it is easier than I would think. However, with the few blue population centers pretty squarely placed in west/southwest Montana, I have a feeling the new district won’t be an automatic win for the bad guys.
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They’re separate bills, but the same basic House membership provision is at section 9 in both of them.
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Some estimates leading up to Monday’s announcement anticipated even bigger gains in the South, where some analysts had projected Texas gaining three seats and Florida gaining two. The underperformance of those states immediately raised questions about whether their burgeoning Hispanic populations were fully counted.
Trump’s census incompetency costing the GOP two potential House seats?
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FWIW, Montana employs a bipartisan commission to draw up its districts. Five members, none of whom are elected officials. Majority and minority leaders in the state house and senate appoint one each, and those four pick a chair (or the state supreme court does it for them). I would not expect a GOP gerrymander to be the result.
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Admittedly I’m reading this in a docs office on my phone, but how can six be gained and seven lost?
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Possibly, but big upside in gerrymandering opportunities if the district-level data misses a bunch of Latinos.
Texan schools Montanan on his own laws… Probably won’t be the last time. 
I’m just conditioned to think the worst will happen politically here in my state but thanks for the clarification. If the commission draws the districts anything like it used to be before we lost our previous seat, I think we’ll have a blue/red split between the two Reps. We shall see.
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i went looking for a map of the old MT-02 district (pre-1990 census) but couldn’t find one. Maybe you’ll have better luck at that than I did, but I thought it would be a decent place to start with what the new district might look like.
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The phrasing in the article is a little disjointed. Seven states are losing 1 representative, five states are gaining 1 representative and one state, Texas, is gaining 2 seats.
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That’s nuts. It is absolutely rediculous that house seats serve differing numbers of people depending on what state they are in.
The release of the new census is a good opportunity to expand the house. Any chance to get senators from states that are losing house seats (and thus EVs) to vote for an expansion of the house?
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(Serious question) So are we all now going with “Trump’s obstruction of the 2020 census really wasn’t a big deal”? And if so, why?
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That’s a really good question. Before we get all the hot takes on why the last ten years had unexpectedly slow growth, we should probably make sure that’s what happened- as opposed to just a massive undercount
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