Cite as: 505 U. S. 788 (1992)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
lished in 1849.2 A Census Office in the Department of the Interior was established in 1899 and made permanent in 1902.3 A year later, the Census Office was moved to the newly formed Department of Commerce and Labor.4
Following each census, Congress enacted a statute to reap-portion the House of Representatives. After the 1920 census, however, Congress failed to pass a reapportionment Act. This congressional deadlock provided the impetus for the 1929 Act that established a self-executing apportionment in the case of congressional inaction. See S. Rep. No. 2, 71st Cong., 1st Sess., 2-4 (1929). The bill produced an automatic reapportionment through the application of a mathematical formula to the census. The automatic connection between the census and the reapportionment was the key innovation of the Act.5
In its original version, the bill directed the Secretary of Commerce to apply a mathematical formula to the census figures and to transmit the resulting apportionment calculations to Congress. A later version made the President responsible for performing the mathematical computations and reporting the result. From the legislative history, it is clear that this change in the designated official was intended to have no substantive significance.6 There is no indication
2 See C. Wright, The History and Growth of the United States Census, S. Doc. No. 194, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 40 (1900).
3 32 Stat. 51.
4 32 Stat. 826-827.
5 See 71 Cong. Rec. 1609-1610 (1929) (remarks of Sen. Vandenberg). The automatic reapportionment on the basis of the decennial census was retained when the reapportionment features of the bill were modified somewhat in 1941. Act of Nov. 15, 1941, 55 Stat. 761. See Department of Commerce v. Montana, 503 U. S. 442, 451-452, and n. 25 (1992).
6 The sponsor of the bill, Senator Vandenberg, explained the change: "[T]he President of the United States is substituted in the bill as the person who shall make the computation and report instead of the Secretary of Commerce, who was identified in the bill last February simply and solely because it was my own personal notion that if we were to accomplish a permanent end through the passage of permanent legislation it were
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