Skip to main content

Fixing gerrymandering of districts is the best way to #DrainTheSwamp

This is the fourth installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take. The overview is here.
 
NOTE:  I took a long hiatus for several personal reasons.  The entire series was already written a few months after the 2016 Presidential election, but I'm updating as needed as I post the ones as yet unpublished.  Surprisingly little has changed.
 
One of President Trump’s main slogans during the campaign was to “drain the swamp.”  The swamp was Washington, and draining it meant removing the corrupting influences, like lobbyists. We won’t be diving into why I think he has made no real attempt to actually fulfill that promise, but instead, let’s focus on why it resonated.  Congress has an abysmal popularity number.  As Arnold points out in this humorous (but slightly NSFW) video , cockroaches and herpes have higher poll numbers.  The President’s are better than that, but still more people dislike him than like him.
 
For this discussion, let’s define gerrymandering as manipulating voting districts so that certain groups will be virtually guaranteed to win. This is an issue that gets broad bi-partisan support … at least among the actual legislators, as they can cut deals with each other that make it likely they will stay in power, at least for the short term.  Partisan gerrymandering that favors only one party is possibly theoretically unconstitutional (though SCOTUS cannot decide what the standard is to determine it, or what the remedy should be – we should hear again in the Wisconsin gerrymandering case); bi-partisan gerrymandering is currently legal.

It is a bad deal for voters, but it is also questionable for legislators. Why?  Because when you draw a district where the left is always going to win, the moderate incumbent must now face down a challenge from the left, and no matter who wins, that person knows they must keep the left happy to retain power.  That means that there are powerful disincentives to compromise, and the drive to accomplish goals takes a backseat to the drive to be ideologically pure.  The real elections become primaries, and those primaries are much more controllable than general elections.  (I'm trying to be non-partisan here, but it is certainly true that the GOP has been the biggest recent offenders here.  This is coming back to bite them already, as the loose-cannon GOP candidate Roy Moore will be highly unlikely to help anyone reach consensus on any big initiatives.)

When this sort of “purity” of thought is desired, well-meaning people are less likely to run for office, especially moderates.  And even the moderates have to pander to the extreme, which disgusts even those that end up voting for them.  Eventually, legislators wake up to realize that STDs are more popular.
How do you fix this?  There are some straightforward solutions that states have tried, with some success.  You can create neutral voting criteria that the legislator must consider, but while this is helpful, it is still having the fox guard the henhouse, and it seems likely eventually legislators will push these rules to their limits. A better method is to create a non-partisan standing committee for redistricting.
Of course, there is a more structural solution, which is to get rid of districting altogether by changing the first-past-the-post, winner take all system to something else, like having at-large members or, even more radically, to a European-style proportional voting system.  The last suggestion would also have the likely effect of breaking the two-party stranglehold on our political system, which many people seem to want.  (I'm ambivalent.)
In my opinion, without fixing this gerrymandering issue, there is little chance that we will have a Congress we can feel good about anytime soon, and without a good process, the rest is moot.  So, if people want to drain the swamp, I can get behind that – let’s start here.
Thoughts?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to read the Bill of Rights

The legal rights in the Bill of Rights didn't exist until the 20th century Social media has been abuzz with the Bill of Rights, and in particular the 1st Amendment, recently. Many posts, explicitly or implicitly, trace the Bill of Rights to the Founders.  That's wrong and leads to a poor understanding. A proper reading of the Constitution and the law reveals that, while the text was written then, these rights did not apply even on paper to the states until 1868, in fact until the middle of the 20th century, or even into the 21st century for the 2nd Amendment. “It is a Constitution we are expounding.” The Constitution sets out principles and goals, structures and limitations, and we must never forget that . It is law -- the highest law of the land , in fact -- but it is not code , which is detailed and often attempts to be exhaustively complete and explicit. The Constitution was written to provide a framework of balances by a group of  flawed aristocrats trying to rebel from an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Election 2016: Why Hillary’s conflated scandals are unconvincing #ImWithHer

This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016 . To be honest, I’ve stopped listening to most of the scandals about Hillary. That’s not because I think she is perfect or would never do something scandalous, but because the noise of obvious crap, generated over 3 decades, has made me jaded about spending any time investigating stories by people who think Killary is a fascist Communist. To be clear, I think she is an imperfect human. We don’t subject most politicians to the kind of scrutiny that Hillary has faced – how much do we know about George and Laura’s relationship, or his struggles with addiction, for instance?  But she isn’t perfect.  I think she is a bit paranoid and has a tendency to “circle the wagons” at the slightest sign of problems, and I think she is a fierce competitor that swings first and asks questions later. Like all successful politicians, she is willing to spin the truth to meet her needs, and she comes across, in crowd settings, as a bit fak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why COVID-19 is MUCH worse than the seasonal flu

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...
3 comments
Read more