Firstly what you are saying is not ultimately correct. The electorate votes for the people that decide to legislate for an independent commission.
Secondly, elected bodies appoint non-elected officials all the time. That’s not undemocratic, unless the person they appointed has more power than the elected body. Which a boundary setting official would not be, if his/her mandate was to draw neutral boundaries, and if the official can be recalled by the elected body.
Anyway, it has never been the case that in a democracy the current incumbents have - due to being elected - a mandate to attack the democratic system itself. Which is what gerrymandering is. If you take your thinking to its logical conclusion you are saying that those who have been voted into government can do anything up to and including making laws that mean they can never be voted out.
Okay, for the record, I have no problem with redistricting commissions. The only problem I have is with people saying that their duly elected state representatives doing the job the Constitution has outlined for them is in some way undemocratic or corrupt.
Is an independent redistricting commission a good idea? Maybe so, I might even say probably. Is state representatives doing the same job they’ve done since 1790 a terrible act of tyranny? No. That’s all I’m getting at. Not criticizing the way they do it in Canada, just disputing the criticism that the US is some undemocratic hellhole because we don’t do it that way.
I’d assume they defend it the way lawyers who fight for rapists and murderers do: If the game is fair and the rules are consistent, then playing to win isn’t a problem so much as an obligation.
This isn’t a new thing. Democrats do it, Republicans do it, even the Whigs and Federalists did it. This is the game, and this is how it’s played. There’s a proud, 220-year history of gerrymandering in this country. To make things fair now would almost be unfair. “You mean Republicans just had a decade to draw the maps in their favor and now that the Dems are in power, we have to sit around and sing kumbaya with those guys instead of getting our own fair shot at the maps?”
Well it might have to be the next best thing and be bipartisan, I suppose. But every state has an elections board so you could make it one of their duties to set new districts.
This may be the most ridiculous defense you could have made. The whole point is that gerrymandering takes away a fair shot at multiple elections, and is self-perpetuating.
Anyone who blames one side’s “bad acts” on the other side, or on the voters, is a propagandist/ immoral person. To blame the Democrats for Republican bad actions (or vice versa), requires first, that you declare that no one is personally responsible for their own choices and actions.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I am an old school conservative, who DEMANDS that everyone is responsible for whatever they choose to do, and for whatever they control, to the extent that they control it.
Therefore, there is NEVER a legitimate excuse for “gerrymandering.” Ever. The nonsense that we should blame Obama for the fact that REPUBLICANS chose to commit the “crime” of rigging elections, is an example of that. You might as well blame all bank robberies and burglaries, not on the robbers, but on the people who were so foolish as to have money.
Now, as to the actual events. The thing to realize is, that for gerrymandering to effect a PERMANENT majority for the party who arranges it, the party’s own VOTERS have to remain unalterably supportive of what that party actually does with their ill-gotten power. And in American History at least, political parties have never managed to maintain consistent leadership AND consistent followers, who DON’T move from inside of a gerrymandered district to outside it, long enough to lead to a total emasculation of the other side.
So as someone who I mostly disagree with above said, this will indeed pass, no matter what the GOP does, just as the Democrats eventually lost THEIR gerrymandered arrangements over time.
Two more related observations:
Anyone who in any way SUPPORTS this Republican strategy, is by definition, anti-democracy. Because democracy is about equal voices when voting, and gerrymandering is a trick to prevent equality.
Since the Republicans have ALREADY struck down the rule which allowed lawsuits to challenge gerrymandering, anyone who doesn’t like their existing districts, will have to wait until after the next national Census, to effect change, since that is the only time most areas ALLOW redistricting to be done.
I’m skipping over your political philosophy, which I can’t follow, and concentrating on fact.
What rule was struck down? Gerrymandering cases are being heard continually in court, with rulings coming down within the last week. In addition there are currently cases before the Supreme Court.
North Carolina looks like a contender, though they do have a lot of independents. Democrats outnumber Republicans by a bit, yet Republicans dominate the congressional delegation. Republicans do hold the senate, though.
As a resident of said District 3, I’ll explain that map for you.
Western Maryland is rural, and would therefore swing Republican, so instead of including Frederick and Carroll counties with the panhandle, as would make sense geographically and culturally, there is a tongue sticking down into Montgomery County which is densely populated with government workers and generally leans left, and that’s kind of a swing district.
Anne Arundel (Annapolis), Calvert and St. Mary’s counties are also geographically and culturally similar and would be a fairly safe Republican seat, so that’s gerrymandered out of existance, by being combined with denser and overwhelmingly Democratic parts of PG county and Baltimore.
The Eastern Shore is also rural, and therefore Republican, but it’s kind of hard to gerrymander away the Chesapeake Bay, and so that remains as the lone safe GOP seat.
The rest of the gerrymandering around Baltimore is done to create a couple majority-black districts.
As far as worst-in-the-nation, I also submit Florida 5. It doesn’t look so bad Until you realize everything in the middle is either National Forest or ranchland. It’s essentially African-American neighborhoods in Jacksonville, Orlando, and Gainesville, tied together with miles of empty forest and swamp.
To be fair to the fine geometricians in Annapolis, the equal-population requirement pretty much demands that Calvert and St.Mary’s counties be yoked to somewhere more urban to make the numbers threshold, the trick is in to where it is done. And it has really gotten worse in the last few go-arounds.
People tend to care less about state elections and legislatures. They get less attention, and the simple fact is, republicans tend to care more about voting in general than democrats do. We democrats usually just whine on Facebook or attend an occasional protest, but republicans vote. And unless that behavior changes, expect more of the same.
Republicans have looked unbeatable before, and just when they appear to be most invincible, the economy snaps people back to reality and the independents team up with liberals to shift the balance of power. It’ll most likely happen again in 2018 or 2020 – provided that the democratic party doesn’t have a civil war in the interim. The potential fracturing of the left is what concerns me most. Bernie Sanders may not be running for president, but like the tea party republicans, they’ve set into motion the dynamics for a more aggressive and extreme left wing within the party.
The one that I find interesting is Nebraska, which is as a state completely dominated by one party, but which is still remarkably un-gerrymandered. In fact, if you came up with an algorithm to produce the fairest districts possible, and applied it to Nebraska, you’d end up with something almost identical to what they actually have. As a result, Nebraska, despite being one of the reddest states in the Union overall, still manages to sometimes send a Democrat to the House, and even (due to their splitting of their electoral votes) sometimes even an electoral vote to the Democratic presidential candidate.
What are the Nebraskans doing right, here? Is it just another manifestation of the state’s inherent political contrariness? The rest of us should figure it out.
Right. The geodemographics of Nebraska – one third of the people in Omaha, another third near and around Metro Omaha, the rest scattered around a whole damn lot of empty, and any significant diversity concentrated in Omaha and Lincoln – do not really require much creative design at the scale of a Congressional District. Also, although ideologically “red” in its majority, the caucus dynamic of the Nebraska Unicameral Legislature IS different from other states: they are elected on a nonpartisan ballot and their chamber caucuses are aligned by urban/rural so it makes sense that they come up with an urban/exhurban/rural distribution of represented interests.
Nebraska Congressional districts. The alternative would be if anything to instead of dividing the 1st and 3rd concentrically, split them along their population midpoints on the N/S axis and re-merge to create a North and South district, but that would be diluting the rural and suburban interests. Similarly with creating three radially arranged districts converging at Omaha. OTOH at the smaller level of the 46 state legislative districts, once inside Omaha and Lincoln you DO get more jigsawing with the borders, and it’s still nothing like FL, MD or NC.
Contrast Idaho, whose two congressional districts split into a West District including the Panhandle and an East/Central district (Here Be Potatoes), and they make for reapportionment changes by adjusting how they split the Boise area since that’s where the population actually is.
