Just Redistricting. I was startled to see rightwing commentator Dick Morris say in the New York Post today that by gerrymandering the Texas legislature Tom "DeLay managed to do something that is very, very wrong and highly injurious to our democracy — to fix the elections for the House of Representatives, in effect to take the ballot out of our hands."
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Morris gained fame as an advisor to ostensibly Democratic President Bill Clinton, but has, since leaving that service, been an outspoken opponent of most Democratic principles. This is part of what I observed years ago, that Bill Clinton was 'a new kind of Democrat' — a Republican.
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Thus was I surprised that Morris actually regards as sinful the malicious drawing of legislative districts by the party in power at any given time, to bunch populations by party as to reduce the possibility of truly competitive elections upsetting their applecart. That is, instead of districts including random numbers of Democrats and Republicans, district lines now encircle concentrations of one party or the other as to provide safe seats for members of the majority party and reduce the influence of the other party.
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Typically, reapportionment puts as many people likely to vote for the minority party (say, Democrats) into a single district as possible, and scatters the remnants thinly among other districts where there is a majority for their own party (Republicans). That way, instead of there being five districts with roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, there is one district that is 95% Democratic — one seat — and four that are 60% Republican.
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Morris says that this partisan redistricting has resulted in a stark reduction in the number of incumbents who can be ousted in any election cycle:

In the elections following the 1980 census, 42 House members were defeated. In those after the 1990 election, 39 lost their seats. But after the 2000 census, only 16 members were defeated — half by other incumbents drawn into the same districts as a result of the shrinkage of the state population. * * * This massive disservice to democracy makes a mockery of calls for increased voter turnout. What is the point when the lines have been drawn in such a way as to fix the results?

My goodness! A rightwinger who actually believes in democracy! Maybe our civilization isn't doomed after all.
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In response to Dick Morris's column, I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post:

It is an oddity of our system that state legislatures draw the boundaries for Congressional districts. That oddity is not in the Constitution itself, so Congress can take that power away from the states and draw Congressional districts itself. Or it can leave the process with state legislatures but set the rules. The simplest and fairest way to draw such lines is to start in one corner (say, the northwest) of a state and, by computer, draw districts as compact as possible, that is, as close to square as can be. And Congress does not have to wait until the next census but can mandate that boundaries be redrawn all over the Nation by, say, March 2006 (well in advance of November elections), using the data from the 2000 census.
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Once Congressional boundaries are redrawn by a rule of strict compactness, without regard to any other consideration whatsoever save that no building would be divided by a boundary line, the public would almost certainly demand that the same rule be applied to state legislative districts. Then we would have a fix — as soon as a few months from now, given the speed with which computers work — to the problem that Dick Morris rightly points out, that gerrymandering has robbed us of the accountability that elections are supposed to give us over our representatives.

If states need some computing help, I'm sure the Feds have time available on supercomputers that they could give over to state legislatures. But if Mapquest can find darned near every street in the country, I don't think any state legislature would have trouble drawing legislative district lines with an ordinary personal computer.
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(Responsive to "The Real Sin of Tom DeLay", column by Dick Morris in the New York Post, September 30, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,933.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:14 PM