Bad Max

One of the first articles I ever wrote for The American Prospect was about Max Baucus, who's both a strikingly terrible Democrat and takes strikingly little heat for it since he's not really much of a grandstander. At any rate, his suckitude continues as yesterday he helped vote against a plan to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives. His reason?

Baucus said in a written statement that he opposed the bill because Montana has only one House vote. "If we were to expand the House, Montana's voice would become less influential," he said.

Chris Orr brings the math:

Now, my back-of-the-envelope calculation--and I hope readers will feel free to correct it if it's wrong--finds that Montana's single House vote currently makes up 0.2299 percent of the total House vote. If the House were expanded from 435 members to 437, Montana's share would drop to 0.2288 percent. Yes, Baucus felt obligated to vote against any federal representation for residents of the District of Columbia, because it would reduce the relative clout of his states' residents (in the House only, the Senate would be unaffected) by one-thousandth of one percent.

And, of course, Montana would be ludicrously overrepresented in congress whether or not DC got a vote.