Does the 118th Congress “look like America”?
Let’s assume that it should — yes, a highly dubious premise, but go with it — and examine the numbers compiled by the Pew Research Center.
Racially, there are nontrivial divergences. The share of black members of Congress is 11.2 percent, below but not wildly remote from the portion of Americans of African ancestry: 13.6 percent. Whites, in contrast, are overrepresented — 74.3 percent versus 59.3 percent. The disparity impacting Hispanic lawmakers is serious. (Don’t tell Pat Buchanan.) They’re 10.1 percent of senators and representatives, but Latinos comprise a hefty 18.9 percent of the population. Practitioners of genitalia-oriented Identity Politics must be delighted that the federal legislative branch has “the highest number of openly [lesbian, gay, or bisexual] members in history.” But at 2.4 percent, the cohort is two-thirds less than Gallup’s latest findings on those who “self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual.”
Then there’s religion. Here, things get awfully dicey. As Pew noted:
Since 2007, the share of Christians in the general population has dropped from 78% to its present level of 63%. Nearly three-in-ten U.S. adults now say they are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” up from 16% who did not identify with a religion 16 years ago. But Christians make up 88% of the voting members of the new 118th Congress … sworn in on Jan. 3 — only a few percentage points lower than the Christian share of Congress in the late 1970s.
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