Like many progressives, I would be delighted to have a Green New Deal as well as a host of other progressive programs that would immediately and directly help the American people. However, this is not going to happen anytime soon. Joe Manchin has shown that he can single-handedly prevent it now; he has in the past. His help from Republicans will grow exponentially if they reclaim one or both houses of Congress this coming November.

All the same, political power in the United States is distributed in a way that gives Republicans far more influence than they are warranted. They hold half the seats in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that their senators represent only 43% of the population, compared to the Democrats 57% In other words, 43% of the American people are represented by the 50 Republican senators; the remaining 57% by the 50 Democrats. That is clearly unfair.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, five million more Americans (3%) voted for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, and yet the Democrats have only a few more seats than the Republicans. Once again, this is unfair, especially as we will shortly have new elections for the House with hundreds of districts that are gerrymandered.

The Supreme Court is heavily weighted towards Republicans, in a particularly pernicious way since five justices were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote. They became presidents only because of the antiquated Electoral College.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were appointed by President George W. Bush who lost the popular election to Al Gore by 500,000 people. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were appointed by Donald Trump who lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by three million popular votes.

Over half (5 out of 9) of the justices who were appointed by semi-illegitimate presidents. This has been a grave and great injustice and needs to be corrected.

These problems of disproportionate power in the hands of Republicans exists in all three branches of our government. This is why we need a recalibration of how power is distributed in Washington and in our states. Recalibration is different from retribution. Changes should not be designed to make it “the Democrats turn.” Instead, it should be time for “fairness to prevail.”

Here’s how we would do it in three steps:

1. Either abolish the Electoral College or codify the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in which the electors in all states are bound to vote for whomever one the national popular vote, not the vote in their state. This would be fair because our presidents would be elected solely on the basis of the vote of the people – the people who he or she represents.
2. Outlaw gerrymandering, the practice of dividing geographic areas into legislative districts in a way that gives one party an advantage over another. By outlawing gerrymandering, the number of seats from each party from each state would come close to reflecting that party’s percentage of voters in the state.
3. Institute some permanent and temporary changes to the Supreme Court:
   1. Permanent: Put term limits on how long a Supreme Court justice can serve, perhaps twenty years.
   2. Temporary: Because the court is currently leaning so far to the right, allow President Joe Biden to nominate three additional justices to the Supreme Court, temporarily constituting the court with ten members. Each of Biden’s nominees would be linked to one of the three Trump appointees. They would leave the Court when that particular Trump appointee no longer serves. The president at that time will then select one nominee to replace the two. When all six of the Trump and Biden appointees (exclusive of Ketanji Jackson Brown) are no longer on the court, it will be back down to nine members.

It is fair to ask how could this come to be. Why would Republicans accept these three changes, all of which would help Democrats, at least in the short run? These would be difficult changes to enact under any circumstances.

Naturally, there is no guarantee that Republicans would accept any of these changes. However, if the American people knew that Democrats were going to take a temporary pass on the most impactful items in their legislative agenda in order to spend several years focusing on recalibrating our democracy, it is possibly that many independents would join Democrats and a few Republicans to get this done. No guarantees, but the idea of advancing and simplifying democracy has a natural appeal to a great many voters. It’s worth a try because Manchin and the Republicans are not going away.

The post Recalibrating our Political System appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You probably did not think that a key reason why the current Supreme Court is so out of whack with much of America is because of gerrymandering. This is so because the makeup of every Court is determined by the two other gerrymandered branches of government, the executive and legislative.

Twelve of the last fifteen justices have been appointed by Republican presidents, and that is not an accident. With our Constitution, it is virtually impossible not to have partisan Supreme Courts when we choose our presidents and legislators in ways that are mired in a deep gerrymandering pie, or cesspool.

Here’s how it works:

The U.S. Senate is perhaps the most insidious form of gerrymandering that we have. A good working definition of gerrymandering from Merriam-Webster is “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.” At the time that the American constitution was created, there were no political parties. But there were political interests. The most significant of these interests was what powers would individual states have as opposed to the federal government.

For example, who would be responsible for determining whether a road should be built, or whether it would be legal for a sixteen-year-old to drink whiskey? Who would be able to levy taxes, or even tariffs? At the time that the constitution was being written, there were two key interests within the states that created the groundwork for gerrymandering:

1. The smaller states such as Rhode Island or Delaware did not want to be overpowered at the federal level by larger ones such as New York or Virginia.
2. The states where slavery was legal and was commonly used wanted to have equal power to the states that did not have slavery.

Many of the founding fathers were leery of direct democracy, meaning direct votes by the people. In order to prevent runaway “popular democracy,” the founders created a Senate to go along with the House of Representatives in the Congress. The Senate was undemocratic in two ways, both of which impacted the Supreme Court.

1. Initially, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not the people. This would be a way of better ensuring that the interests of the states, as opposed to the people, were represented in the Senate. This was clearly undemocratic, and in 1917, the 17^th Amendment was passed, allowing the people to vote for their Senators. But at that time, “the people” were essentially only white males.
2. Each state has two senators. That ensures that there is equal representation among all the states in the Senate. At the same time, it ensures that at least one house of Congress does not include equal representation of the people. For example, California has a population of nearly 40 million people while Wyoming has less than 600 thousand. For each person in Wyoming, there are over 60 in California. What that means in the Senate is that each person in Wyoming has as much power as 60 people in California. That is terribly unfair, and it means that states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc. have far more power in the Senate than states like California, Texas and New York. The same is true for southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina which are relatively small by population. Additionally, these states are no longer politically competitive. Conservative Republicans win virtually all state-wide elections including for the Senators.

Right now, the U.S. Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But Democratic Senators represent nearly 57% of the population, whereas Republican Senators represent around 43%. If the Senate was democratic, the Democrats would have a large majority. But in today’s real world the Democrats will probably lose seats in the 2022 mid-term election and once again be a minority.

We should also point out that the House of Representatives is gerrymandered in a different way. Take Missouri for example. It has eight Congressional seats. Recently, the state has voted between 50% – 60% Republican. Even at 60%, Republicans should get only five of the seats. However, they get six and some tried to get them seven. Why does it come out this way?

It is because in Missouri the districts are drawn by the state legislature. The Missouri General Assembly is currently veto-proof Republican. What the legislature has done is to draw two “minority majority” districts. This means districts in which some minority constitutes a majority of the voters. In Missouri, it is African-Americans. One district is in the eastern part of the state, St. Louis, and the other in the western part, Kansas City. None of the other districts is competitive.

Similar to the legislative branch, the executive (presidency) is deeply influenced by gerrymandering. The way in which the founding fathers took care of that was by creating the Electoral College. The E.C. is not really a college. It is a barely known organization that only exists every four years, when there is a presidential election. The number of representatives that each state has in the E.C. is somewhat based on population, but not entirely. What is important to know is that when the Electoral College works properly, the electors from each state vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. In other words, the electors in Alabama vote for whomever carried the state and the electors in California vote for whomever won that state.

Where it gets undemocratic is let’s suppose that Candidate A carries Alabama by one million votes and loses California by a 400,000 votes. You might think that Candidate A would be ahead at that point, because she has 600,000 more votes than Candidate ‘B.’ But with the Electoral College, Candidate ‘B’ is ahead with 55 Electoral Votes from California as opposed to Candidate ‘B’ who has the 9 Electoral Votes from Alabama.

The fact that a candidate can lose the popular vote and still be elected president through the E.C. is not just hypothetical. It has happened five times in our history. The two most recent are the two most consequential. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote from George Bush by over a half million votes. However, Bush won the Electoral vote when the Supreme Court made a decision that gave Bush Florida’s electoral votes. That would not have mattered if the decision had been made by the popular vote.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than three million votes. However, Trump narrowly won “battleground states” such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and that propelled him to an Electoral victory.

It’s possible that two of our worst presidents ever were elected by the Electoral College than the popular vote. These two presidents are also responsible for five of the current six conservatives on the Supreme Court. Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito; Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

This is how the Supreme Court became impacted by gerrymandering. Without a gerrymandered presidency and a gerrymandered Senate, the Supreme Court would have been more balanced and reflective of the values of the American people.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court itself has recently refused to overturn the creation of gerrymandered districts by the states.

The political ramifications of the gerrymandering dynamics is that Republicans are helped in all three branches. Theoretically, the three branches of government are supposed to restrain one another through a system of checks and balances. But that does not work when all three branches are dominated by one party, and that particular party is intent on thoroughly dominating government and extending very few levers of power to minority parties.

How can this change? At the moment, it’s difficult to conceive. Trump Republicans have a number of plans to further a radical right agenda in America. For our government to become more balanced it will require challenging victories by non-Republicans in congressional and presidential races. Stay tuned to see if that happens.

The post The Gerrymandering Virus – It’s Everywhere! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

After the November 2018 midterm election, Missouri voters could congratulate themselves on being ahead of the curve in the nationwide drive for anti-gerrymandering laws. But the elation was short-lived. One day after voters passed Constitutional Amendment 1—nicknamed “Clean Missouri”— by an overwhelming 61% margin, Republicans in the “Show Me” state showed their true colors and began a cynical effort to undermine the new law.

The Clean Missouri amendment includes sweeping new provisions aimed at reducing government corruption at the state level. The new law limits gifts to legislators and bans elected lawmakers from becoming lobbyists immediately after serving in office, among other restrictions.

But the biggest news in the new law is how it revises the process for redrawing congressional district boundaries after each national census. And that’s the provision that Missouri Republicans are targeting.

Here’s what is different about Missouri’s new approach to congressional redistricting. According to AP,

Other states have created independent commissions and required bipartisan votes to redraw legislative and congressional districts. Missouri will be the first to rely on a new mathematical formula to try to engineer “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” in its state legislative districts; the Legislature will continue drawing the state’s congressional districts.

It’s an experiment—one that Missouri Republicans want no part of because, according to an AP analysis:

…it has the potential to end the Republicans’ super-majorities in the state House and state Senate and move the chambers closer to the more even partisan division that is often reflected in statewide races. But the size of the likely Democratic gains remains uncertain, partly because the formula has never been put to a test.

[Also, there’s science, analysis and factual information involved. Those things apparently turn off Missouri Republicans as well.]

So, without missing a beat, Missouri Republicans declared war on Amendment 1. According to the New York Times,

The day after the election, the Republican speaker of the Missouri House, Elijah Haahr, said that he wanted “to strike up conversations with African-American lawmakers who have expressed misgivings that Clean Missouri could reduce the [number] of black lawmakers,” Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio reported. That’s a classic strategy for Republican gerrymandering: Effectively guarantee black-held seats in exchange for reducing the overall number of Democratic seats.

In addition,

…opponents of the amendment created a political group to undermine it, Tony Messenger, a metro columnist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has noted. The group has the Alice-in-Wonderland name of “Fair Missouri” and $150,000 in initial funding. Its goal is to place a new measure on the ballot that would sabotage parts of the amendment before they can take effect.

The covert, state demographer gambit

The most cynical anti-Amendment 1 strategy is one that will take place far out of the spotlight of ballot initiatives and special elections. Rumor has it that one Republican state representative is preparing a bill that would simply defund the newly created state demographer’s office.

How would that proposal affect Missouri’s anti-gerrymandering effort? Bigly. A report from KSDK-TV describes the impact:

Currently, state House and Senate districts in Missouri are redrawn after each census by bipartisan commissions. Members are appointed by the governor from nominees submitted by the Democratic and Republican parties.

Amendment 1 creates a new position of nonpartisan state demographer who would propose maps to commissioners that reflect the parties’ share of the statewide vote in previous elections for president, governor and U.S. senator. Criteria of “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” would outrank more traditional criteria such as geographically compact districts.

De-funding the state demographer is a starve-the-beast, behind-the-scenes maneuver that would, essentially, kill the entire effort.

Interestingly, Missouri’s state website has duly posted a job opening for State Demographer and is accepting applicants. Among the duties of the job, the listing says that the state demographer:

Prepares periodic estimates and projections of the state population, and county-by-county population estimates and projections.

Serves as liaison with state agencies, the federal government, and local governments regarding population estimates and projections for the State of Missouri .

And, most importantly,

Supervises the decennial reapportionment project, including the supervision of professional, technical, and clerical personnel.

[Translation: the demographer is in charge of the data used in redistricting after every US Census.]

The pay scale is attractive: $50,000 – $80,000. The job could be a great landing place for a highly competent, non-partisan statistics nerd. The question is: With Republicans in a tizzy about the new law, and given their multi-pronged anti anti-gerrymandering effort, how long will that job posting—or the job itself, once filled—last?

These strategies show that the Show Me State  —  at least its Republican party — is not, as is popularly believed, out of step with the rest of the US. Undermining initiatives passed by voters [and even elections for high office]  is quickly becoming a national Republican strategy. Looking to Wisconsin, Michigan and other states as role models for controverting the time-honored democratic concept of “the will of the people,” Missouri Republicans can now congratulate themselves for being right there in the ugly, sour-grapes, democracy-defying mainstream of the GOP.

The post MO GOP’s overt / covert plots to undermine new anti-gerrymandering law appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Republicans like to talk about honesty; frequently that means being brash and politically incorrect. It’s incumbent for Democrats to see honesty as telling the truth.

There are lies and then there are evasions. No one is better at that than Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s “explainer-in-chief.” She can go hand-to-hand with Rachel Maddow for the better part of an hour and rarely say anything that is true, but her audience (the Trump audience) either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.

I was quite disappointed by what I heard from a Democrat on Maddow’s show on Thursday, December 29. The guest for the segment was Kelly Ward, and the substitute host was Ari Melber.

Ms. Ward had just been tapped by Democrats and Barack Obama to become the point person in the Democrats’ effort to counter the inevitable gerrymandering of Congressional and state legislative districts that Republicans will try to do following the 2020 census. Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class. Both parties have engaged in it through the years, but in recent times, no one has been as effective as the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party in drawing districts in 2012 following the 2010 census.

An example of a gerrymandered district is Florida’s 5^th Congressional District, shown below. Districts are supposed to be “compact and contiguous,” meaning that they should come as close as possible to resembling a rectangle with near-equal sides as possible. Obviously Florida’s 5^th does not do that.

Before anyone gets too bent out of shape by what the Republicans have done, they should first recognize that this is a district that was created with the collaboration of Democrats. In fact, it is actually a district that has been represented by a Democrat, Congresswoman Corinne Brown. It is one of those “minority majority” districts that Republicans and Democrats alike have favored in recent years. As originally constructed, it wound from African-American neighborhoods to Jacksonville to other African-American neighborhoods in Orlando.

Democrats liked the “sure seat,” and Republicans liked that Democratic voters were concentrated in single districts, making most adjacent districts clear for Republicans. However, Democrats objected, and on July 11, 2014, Florida Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis ruled that this district, along with the neighboring District 10, had been drawn to favor the Republican party by packing black Democratic voters into District 5. On August 1, Judge Lewis gave Florida’s state legislature an Aug. 15 deadline to submit new congressional maps for those two districts.

As it turns out, with the boundaries redrawn for the 2016, the 5^th is still represented by an African-American, albeit Al Lawson rather than Corinne Brown.

Ward, the woman tasked with opposing future Republican gerrymandering, was asked by Melber:

Yet, the flip side, which people who are in the Democratic party sometimes talk about, and certainly a lot of progressive reformers talk about it, just adding more gerrymandering isn’t necessarily good. Some Democrats have caught on to that. Take a look at, for example, the Florida fifth district. This is Corrine Brown, drawn obviously in a weird way. That is not contiguous. It doesn’t look like a community. It doesn’t look like something you’d draw for any normal reason and, yet, the Democrat there, Representative Brown, fought to keep it that way after the Republicans redrew it that way. Are you also going to be defending those kind of maps?

Ward responded:

Our goal is to make sure that the process is fair, that Democrats have a seat at the table, and that Democrats can compete on a fair playing field. We have not seen that because of the Republican gerrymandering. Florida is a perfect example of this. The Florida voters passed an initiative giving the legislature boundaries for drawing the maps, and the Republican legislators completely ignored those regulations put on them by the voters and passed what was then later determined to be an illegal map.

In fact, four of the nine seats that Democrats picked up in the House in 2016 were because of redistricting lawsuits that overturned illegal Republican maps, including in Florida. We know that when that happens, Democrats do better. Democrats generally pick up more seats. When the process is more fair, Democrats do better. That is really our goal and that’s what we’ll stay focused on.

Here is video. Kelly Ward does not come on screen until about the half-way point of the clip.

What’s the problem? The problem is that Ward never criticized Florida’s 5^th as it had been drawn for Corinne Brown’s convenience. When Melber asked her, “Are you also going to be defending those kind of maps?” she walked around it, in a Kellyanne Conway fashion.

Progressive Democrats need to have honest answers to today’s problems. We cannot utilize the Republican tactic of diversion if we are to be believed. It will not take long into the Trump presidency for more and more Americans to know that they have been swindled. Democrats need to do three things: (1) provide the public with honest answers, (2) be true to a progressive agenda, and (3) reach out to those voters who were so disaffected from the system that they chose Trump in 2016. Let’s hope that Ward gets that message.

The post Gerrymandering: A litmus test for honesty appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Americans woke up on November 7 having elected a Democratic president, expanded the Democratic majority in the Senate, and preserved the Republican majority in the House. That’s not what they voted for, though.

Most Americans voted for Democratic representation in the House. The votes are still being counted, but as of now it looks as if Democrats have a slight edge in the popular vote for House seats, 49 percent-48.2 percent, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Still, as the Post‘s Aaron Blake notes, the 233-195 seat majority the GOP will likely end up with represents the GOP’s “second-biggest House majority in 60 years and their third-biggest since the Great Depression.”

Republicans took advantage of their majority status in some states to redistrict for both state and U.S. legislatures, redrawing the lines in their favor. So even though Democratic candidates for the House garnered the most actual votes (popular vote), Republicans have taken super majorities in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

After Republicans swept into power in state legislatures in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered key states, redrawing House district boundaries to favor Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates received half of the votes in House contests, but Republicans will claim about three-quarters of the congressional seats.

If this seems familiar, it’s because Missouri Republicans did the same thing here, effectively taking Russ Carnahan out of the game and leaving us one Democratic representative short. The GOP’s “win by any means, at any cost” behavior is the antithesis of democracy, but by all accounts that won’t stop them from stepping all over it in their attempt to gain and retain power.

Leave it to the Republicans to have a back-up plan in case their voter suppression efforts didn’t pay off with election victories in November. Beware all you states with GOP majorities: once they are installed in office, they will have to be dragged from it kicking and screaming. We will have Republican “leadership” (read: obstruction) whether we vote for it or not.

The post Extreme gerrymandering: Coming to a state near you? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In the 1980s, as California redrew its Congressional district boundaries after the census, one Congressman called his draft of a district map his “contribution to modern art,” because of its amorphous, amoebic shape. But he was far from alone in creating a shapeless, non-contiguous, non-compact, gerrymandered Congressional district. And this year, as states wrestle with the latest census update, new weirdly configured boundaries—clearly designed to favor one party or incumbent over another—are making America’s electoral maps more bizarre than ever.

Roll Call has studied the maps and has identified five of the most oddly shaped districts created in this year’s partisan map-making circus. And in the spirit of modern art, they’ve even named them, like this one, which Roll Call has dubbed “The Pinwheel of Death.”

The titles are cute, but the reality of these obviously gerrymandered districts is not. As we learned in Civics 101, the rules for drawing Congressional districts call for compactness and contiguousness.

When you see a district, such as  Ohio’s 9^th District, which is “contiguous” only because two parts of it are connected by a 20-yd.-wide bridge, it’s hard to believe that there was a serious attempt at sticking to the rules. And don’t just blame Republicans. When they get the chance, Democrats create contorted districts, too.

More quandaries about Congressional boundaries

The ugly districts depicted by Roll Call will not be the last ones that will come out of the sausage maker this year. Stay tuned for more, because—with less than 11 months to go before the 2012 election—six of America’s seven most populous states have yet to come up with plans for their Congressional districts. According to Ballot Access News, here’s the situation in Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois and Ohio:

• The legislatures of Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania still haven’t passed any congressional redistricting bills.
• In Texas and Illinois, the legislatures have passed bills to draw new U.S. House districts, but lawsuits are challenging the new districts, and courts have already ordered the normal petitioning period for primary ballot access in those states pushed back.
• In Ohio, the U.S. House districts were redrawn by the legislature, but a referendum petition is circulating. If the petition obtains enough signatures, the legislature’s plan can’t be used until the people vote on the plan in November 2012.

The only states that we can count on to have rational, contiguous and compact districts are those where there’s only one Congressperson–although the shape of the district does not guarantee a rational Congressional representative. Your options are Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

The post America’s five ugliest Congressional districts appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I haven’t seen the new documentary film Gerrymandering but I’ve been intrigued by various reviews. Filmmaker Jeff Reichert tells the story of gerrymandering, beginning with how our country inherited gerrymandering from the Brits, and how they, like our neighbors in Canada, wisely eradicated it from their political process. According to Gar Smith of the Berkeley Daily Planet, the film is based on interviews with more than 50 commentators from across the political spectrum, and Reichert presents a compelling argument that allowing politicians to draw district maps is a tool that works to defeat true democracy.

According to Smith, “The film argues that allowing legislators to draw voting districts means ‘politicians choose voters instead of the other way around.’ Once an urban population has been sliced-and-diced to consolidate wealthy neighborhoods, ensnare partisan cores, or divide and disempower Asian, Hispanic or African American enclaves, ‘it really doesn’t matter who you vote for,’ a seasoned political player observes. ‘The election outcome has already been determined.’

Since I may not have a chance to see the movie, I thought I would pass on a review from both Capitol Weekly and Berkeley Daily Planet, as each arrives at a very different conclusion about the film. But first, I’m going to use this opportunity to educate myself on the practice of gerrymandering—something Reichert recommends we all should do.

What is gerrymandering?

(The following is courtesy of Wikipedia and also from the film’s website.)

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of the redistricting process for political gain.

The Constitution requires that a census be held every ten years to determine the population of each state and that the 435 Congressional seats be reapportioned according to this new data. The Constitution leaves the methods for electing Representatives – including redistricting – up to the individual states. However, both Congress and the courts have placed certain requirements on the redistricting process:

1. Each district must be equal in population
. There must be an equal opportunity for minorities to elect the candidate of their choice

So, every ten years, each state is forced to redraw district lines to account for both adjustments in the size of their overall congressional delegation, and variance in the populations of their already-drawn districts. In a few states —Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Jersey, and Washington —a specially appointed bi-partisan commission handles redistricting. In the rest, politicians control redistricting, and often those whose political careers might be threatened by the change of a line.

Gerrymandering Techniques:

Packing: Placing as many voters of one type in a single district to minimize the number of elections they can influence.

Cracking: Spreading voters of one type over many districts where they will comprise minorities that are unable to influence elections.

Hijacking: Separating an incumbent candidate from his constituents and placing him or her in a district where he or she has no name recognition.

Kidnapping: Drawing two incumbent candidates into the same district so they must run against each other.

Gerrymandering scenarios:

The Original: Gerrymandering is as old as the country itself. In 1812, Jeffersonian Republicans forced through the Massachusetts legislature a bill rearranging district lines to assure them an advantage in the upcoming elections. Although Governor Elbridge Gerry had only reluctantly signed the law, a Federalist editor is said to have exclaimed upon seeing the new district lines, “Salamander! Call it a Gerrymander.” This cartoon-map first appeared in the Boston Gazette for March 26, 1812. Even though the term “gerrymander” originates here, it dates back even further – some say to Patrick Henry drawing Virginia’s first Congressional district map so as to make it harder for James Madison to be elected to Congress.

Partisan Gerrymander: When the party in control of the redistricting process draws the district lines to maximize the power of their own party.

Sweetheart Gerrymander: When the people in charge of redistricting tacitly agree to draw district lines to ensure that incumbents of both parties win reelection.

Racial Gerrymander: The drawing of districts to create opportunity for minority voters to elect a candidate of their choice.

Gerrymandering: A movie review from Capitol Weekly

Malcolm Maclachian and Tony Sheppard writing for Capitol Weekly, feel Gerrymandering does a good job telling its story in human terms. The film makes its case with a series of recent examples, such as the 50 Democratic Texas legislators who fled to Oklahoma in 2003 to stall a legal but unethical effort to redraw that state, just two years after it had been done as part of the standard once-a-decade process. (The Tom Delay-led effort resulted in the GOP gaining six seats.) And, the film provides a play-by-play of California’s Proposition 11 campaign in 2008. In this case, it was Democrats in the California Legislature fighting to prevent change. According to the reviewers, as long as we “have single-member districts, millions of people will be effectively disenfranchised because they’ll have no chance of electing someone who thinks like them.”

So what to do? Gerrymandering floats the idea that the best way to get rid of “the lines” is to go to a European style parliamentary Democracy with proportional representation. And the reviewers ponder the possibility:

The question is: would Americans accept this? More than people in many countries, it seems, we vote for individuals. But haven’t we all learned by now the public niceness, or jerkiness for that matter, has a very indirect relationship to moral behavior when the cameras aren’t on?

A parliamentary democracy, which would guarantee any party with a certain number of votes would get a seat, would likely confuse and anger many people. But if you believe that the top goal of an electoral system is to translate the will of the people into legislators and then into legislation, it is the best system known. It’s often been remarked that our Legislature is ideologically extreme compared to voters, but it’s rather homogenous in terms of party representation. If some of those extreme members were Greens or Libertarians, and moderate Democrats and Republicans needed to work with them in order to form coalitions, the mere act of forming a working government for that session would get us more of the way to a budget.

In short, it’s a worthwhile film on a topic that we really ought to be thinking more about.

Gerrymandering: The movie, the proposition, the conflict of interest

The second review titled “Gerrymandering: The Movie, the Proposition, the Conflict of Interest” is written by Gar Smith of the Berkeley Daily Planet. It is lengthy and goes into detail about the film. But Smith feels the film Gerrymandering, while interesting and informative, also strikes some odd notes, at times making Democratic senators and congressmen look bad. While filmaker Reichert insists it is a non-partisan look at gerrymandering and is a coincidence that its release coincides with the upcoming election, Smith discovers it is being used as a fundraising tool for Proposition 20, a GOP backed proposition scheduled for the November 2 election.

The Voters First Act for Congress (proponents of California’s “anti-gerrymandering” Proposition 20) has taken full advantage of the coincidence. In early October, VFAC distributed 660,000 free DVDs of Reichert’s film as part of a glossy mass-mailed packet urging people to vote “Yes on 20; No on 27.” Mailing this multimedia “nonprofit” message cost somewhere between $102,000 and $113,000.

Proposition 20, he further discovers, is being touted as a grassroots movement to further the democratic process, but has been extensively bankrolled  by two very wealthy California businessmen who want to keep the current commission who oversees redistricting. The current commission is not supported by Democrats, Unions, Firefighters, etc. who are supporting the more progressive Proposition 27 which would abolish the commission.

Smith comes to the following conclusion:

There must be transparency whenever any individual or group decides to attempt to “lead the voters,” be it by gerrymandering, “Astroturf” campaigns, corporate-backed initiatives or documentary films. Viewers — and voters — need to be advised that “Gerrymandering” requires an “R” rating — for A Risky Proposition. Voter discretion is advised.

The post Gerrymandering: The movie appeared first on Occasional Planet.