BARONE ON CONGRESS – AT 8:42 A.M. ET:  This is a must-read – an analysis of the makeup of the new Congress, compared with the mid-1940s.  Michael Barone is one of our best political reporters and historians.  He shows how American politics has evolved in our lifetime.  From the Washington Examiner: 

Before Christmas, Arizona finished its 2nd Congressional District recount, showing Republican Martha McSally beating incumbent Democrat Ron Barber by 167 votes. This means there will be 247 Republicans in the House in the 114th Congress — one more than was elected to the House in the 80th Congress in 1946. It’s the most Republican House since the one elected in 1928, a year when very few of today’s voters were alive.

But while the party numbers are almost precisely the same in the Houses elected this year and 68 years ago, the composition of the two parties’ caucuses (the Republicans call theirs a conference) is sharply different.

One reason is that the reapportionment of House seats following the seven censuses from 1950 to 2010 has shifted many seats from the Northeast, Midwest and Mississippi Valley to Texas, South Atlantic and Western states.

Altogether, 100 seats have been transferred from 27 states to 17 other states. Only six small states have the same number of seats as they did in 1946. The big losers have been New York (down 18 seats), Pennsylvania (down 15), Illinois (down 8) and Ohio (down 7). The big gainers have been California (up 30), Florida (up 21) and Texas (up 15).

The House Republican Conference that assembled in January 1947 was dominated by members from New York (28), Pennsylvania (28), Illinois (20) and Ohio (19). Most came from courthouse towns and sought to roll back the New Deal. They provided the impetus behind the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the power of labor unions — a law that passed despite Harry Truman’s veto and is still in effect today.

They had the votes to override because the House Democratic Caucus included many conservatives in 1947. A majority of its members — 117 of 189 — came from the South (defined here as the 11 old Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma).

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  Print it and keep it.  You'll be referring to Barone's analysis for a long time.

December 30, 2014