Why does the house have stricter rules

On Wednesday, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. It would be a win for the crypto caucus, should it pass. In the other camp sits Sens. They submitted their own rival amendment on Thursday. But based on prior revisions described by Portman, some believe it will leave the door open to a broader definition of "crypto broker" and will potentially subject more crypto investors to these higher taxes.

No one was expecting President Joe Biden to volunteer his take on this one, but late Thursday, the White House formally backed Portman's amendment in a statement attributed to deputy press secretary Andrew Bates. We are grateful to Chairman Wyden for his leadership in pushing the Senate to address this issue, however we believe that the alternative amendment put forward by Senators Warner, Portman, and Sinema strikes the right balance and makes an important step forward in promoting tax compliance.

Since its inception, the White House's vision for the infrastructure bill has been one in which corporations and the wealthiest Americans would fund improvements that benefitted everyone. But Senate Republicans have a different idea, and over the past three months, they have cut tax hikes out of the bill one by one. The crypto reporting rules and their related taxes represent the last vestiges of the corporate tax hikes that were supposed to pay for the bill.

Should the Portman camp win, Blockchain Association executive director Kristin Smith warns the ramifications will be sweeping and massively damaging to the country's crypto industry. As Coinbase struggles, you were better off just buying bitcoin, according to one analyst. Warner has filed an amendment that is anti-technology and anti-innovation — and would be disastrous for the U. The blowback to the White House's endorsement of the Portman-led amendment has been swift and harsh.

Wyden, a liberal Democrat, and Lummis, a conservative Republican, have both pushed back, with Lummis issuing a direct call to action. Pls tweet. Pls email. In practice, the vast majority of congressional districts — perhaps every one in the cycle — will be drawn to be contiguous.

Put differently, all portions of the district are physically adjacent. Few redistricting concepts are absolute, and contiguity is no exception. For example, the city of Racine, Wisconsin, has a non-contiguous boundary boundaries like this are fairly common by-products of annexation. Water also gets special treatment for contiguity. In most cases, districts divided by water are contiguous if a common means of transport like a bridge or ferry route connects the two sides of the district.

Island districts are generally contiguous as long as the island is part of the same district as the mainland area closest to the island or most tied to the island by these sorts of transport routes. The next most common state rule is a requirement to follow political boundaries, like county, city, town, or ward lines, when drawing districts. By state constitution or statute, 34 states require state legislative districts to show some accounting for political boundaries; 15 states impose similar constraints on congressional districts.

Also, if counties or cities have to be split to comply with other redistricting requirements, most state law does not specify whether it is better to minimize the number of jurisdictions that are split, or to minimize the number of times that a given jurisdiction is split.

The former might mean splitting a few jurisdictions into many pieces; the latter might mean splitting a greater number of jurisdictions, but into fewer pieces. As an exception to the general flexibility, Ohio has a rather detailed set of constraints describing how counties and other municipalities are to be split if they have to be split at all.

In California , districts are compact when they do not bypass nearby population for people farther away. In the Voting Rights Act context, the Supreme Court seems to have construed compactness to indicate that residents have some sort of cultural cohesion in common. Scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness, each of which can be applied in different ways to individual districts or to a plan as a whole. These generally fit into three categories. In the first category, contorted boundaries are most important: a district with smoother boundaries will be more compact, and one with more squiggly boundaries will be less compact.

In practice, compactness tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Only 7 states appear to specify a particular measure of compactness: Arizona and Colorado focus on contorted boundaries; California , Michigan , Missouri , and Montana focus on dispersion, though in different ways; and Iowa embraces both.

Several of the other principles above may be seen as proxies for recognizing rough communities of interest. For example, a requirement to follow county boundaries may be based on an assumption that citizens within a county share some common interests relevant to legislative representation. Similarly, a compactness requirement may be based on a similar assumption that people who live close to each other have shared legislative ends.

Considering communities of interest directly is a way to step past the proxy. Most scholarly and popular attention to redistricting has to do with the partisan outcome of the process, though partisan impacts are hardly the only salient impacts.

The federal constitution puts few practical limits on redistricting bodies. Individual districts can be drawn to favor or disfavor candidates of a certain party, or individual incumbents or challengers indeed, the Court has explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage.

State law, however, increasingly restricts undue partisanship. In , only eight states directly regulated partisan outcomes in the redistricting process as opposed to attempting to achieve compromise or balance through the structure of the redistricting body ; now, the constitutions or statutes of 19 states speak to the issue for state legislative districts, and 17 states do the same for congressional districts.

And both Rhode Island and Washington provisions speak in terms of fair and effective representation, but without much construction by state courts to give further meaning. Arizona , Colorado , and Washington are the only states that affirmatively encourage districts that are competitive in a general election, in slightly different ways; in each case, this is a goal to be implemented only when doing so would not detract from other state priorities.

New York prohibits discouraging competition, which is slightly different. And Missouri purports to establish a structure for both rough partisan equity and competition, though its particular implementation of the terms amounts to negligible constraint in practice. Note: where minority populations present the possibility of obligations under the Voting Rights Act , those drawing the lines may have to consider partisan voter history to assess racial polarization, no matter what state law provides.

Also, it is important to remember that every decision to draw district lines in one place or another has a political effect; lines drawn without looking at underlying voting data can be just as politically skewed as lines drawn with the data in mind. There are three other notable structural rules that, in some states, govern the location of district lines.

New Feature! To download maps for offline use and create comparisons in other applications, visit the section Maps For Download. Find a State. Process National Overview Redistricting - What is redistricting?

Home Process Redistricting Where are the lines drawn? Select a state for detailed information and criteria. Where are the lines drawn? On this page. Equal population The U. Congressional districts. The standard for congressional districts allows relatively small deviations , when deployed in the service of legitimate objectives. States must make a good-faith effort to draw districts with the same number of people in each district within the state, and any district with more or fewer people than the average must be justified by a consistent state policy.

But consistent policies that leave a relatively small spread from largest to smallest district will likely be constitutional. In , for example, the Supreme Court approved a congressional plan in West Virginia with 0. Over a series of cases, it has become accepted that a plan will be constitutionally suspect if the largest and smallest districts are more than ten percent apart.

This is not a hard line: a state plan may be upheld if there is a compelling reason for a larger disparity, and a state plan may be struck down if a smaller disparity is not justified by a good reason.

Minority representation The other set of major federal redistricting rules concerns race and ethnicity. Where discrimination plays or has played a significant role, and where voting is substantially polarized along racial or ethnic lines, look at electoral patterns and decide whether minorities already have proportionate electoral power.

If not, the Voting Rights Act might require a change to the lines to give a compact and sizable minority community equitable electoral opportunity they do not currently enjoy.

When considering race in drawing districts, whether to satisfy the Voting Rights Act or otherwise, consider other factors in the mix as well. Intentional discrimination.

For more than years, the Constitution has prohibited intentional government efforts to treat similarly situated people worse than others, because of their race or ethnicity.

Other tactics abound. And they have been used with disappointing frequency. Redistricting legislation usually just describes which census blocks fall in which districts, or which streets district lines follow: nothing in a redistricting statute looks like it has anything to do with race.

That remains true no matter the underlying motive for the discrimination. Sometimes, the reason for intentional discrimination is old-fashioned hatred or stereotype.