Tompaine.com
The Gerrymander Moment By Rob
Richie and Steven Hill December 8, 2003
Led by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and George Bush's
political mastermind Karl Rove, Republicans have brought the blood
sport of legislative redistricting to new lows by spurring Texas and
Colorado to gerrymander congressional districts mid-decade. But a
ruling on Dec. 1 by Colorado's Supreme Court tossing out the state's
plan suggests that there may be limits to particularly brazen abuse
of political redistricting.
With the Supreme Court set this week to hear oral arguments in
Vieth v. Jubelirer —a challenge to a Republican partisan
gerrymander in Pennsylvania that marks the first gerrymandering case
taken by the court since 1986—we will soon know if the court could
step in where Congress and most states have abysmally failed and set
public interest standards for redistricting. But even if the court
does take action, it will be just a start to establishing a reform
that is critical to any effort to claim democracy in the United
States.
As a quick tutorial, every 10 years the U.S. Census releases new
population data, and elected officials in nearly every political
jurisdiction in the nation carve up the political landscape into new
legislative districts to ensure representatives have an equal number
of constituents.
Some cities and states have procedures to promote public interest
in this redistricting process, but most do little to prevent the
creation of a hodgepodge of districts gerrymandered to protect
incumbents and build partisan advantage. With increasingly
sophisticated computer software, polling results and demographic
data, incumbent legislators quite literally choose the voters before
the voters have a chance to choose them. As a result of the
redistricting process, most voters are locked into one-party
districts where their only real choice at election time is to ratify
the incumbent or heir apparent of the party controlling that
district.
After years of simmering as a backburner concern for wonks and
insiders, redistricting has burst onto the national scene in the
wake of a sharp rise in non-competitive elections and hardened
partisan lines in Congress and many states. Nearly every major
newspaper, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles
Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and
Washington Post have called for reforms to provide greater
fairness and voter choice, usually based on the criteria-driven
process instituted in Iowa in the '80s. Unlike many reforms, fair
redistricting has drawn fervent support from across the spectrum,
ranging from conservatives at the Wall Street Journal and
Cato Institute to moderate Republicans like Iowa Congressman Jim
Leach and Arizona Senator John McCain and Democrats like former
Vermont Governor Howard Dean and Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer.
It was bad enough that in 2001 both Republicans and Democrats
elevated incumbent protection in redistricting to new levels. In
California, for example, incumbent U.S. House Democrats paid $20,000
apiece to a redistricting consultant—the brother of an incumbent—to
have "designer districts" drawn for them. Republicans went along
with this cozy arrangement in exchange for their own safe seats. The
result was an unbroken parade of landslide wins, with no challenger
to an incumbent winning even 40 percent of the vote. Nationally,
only four challengers defeated House incumbents, the fewest in
history, while fewer than one in 10 races were won by competitive
margins inside 55 percent to 45 percent.
The lockdown of the U.S. House has major repercussions for our
political process and representative government. Elected every two
years, with representatives closer to the people than senators or
the president, the House was designed to reflect the will and
different interests of the nation. The reality is far different.
Hardly any members can be held electorally accountable, given the
paucity of primary challenges (indeed more members have died in
office than lost in primaries in the last decade) and lopsided
general elections grounded in their incumbency advantages and
districts drawn to have a majority of voters backing their party.
The growth in seats held by women and people of color has come to a
standstill after a sharp rise in 1992, after the last redistricting.
Control of the House is nearly as fixed in stone as the routine
98 percent re-election rates. Since 1954, control of the U.S. House
has changed just once, when Newt Gingrich and Republicans took over
in 1994. Democrats gained a few seats in each election between 1996
and 2000, but Republicans cemented their grip in 2002 after
dominating redistricting in several large states. Despite Democrats
theoretically needing to only pick up 13 seats to regain the House,
few observers believe that possible this decade without a dramatic
surge toward Democrats. A win for George W. Bush in 2004 would make
it even harder for Democrats, as it likely would lead to a wave of
retirements of Democratic members whose only chance at influence is
a sympathetic president.
Redistricting was a key reason for Republican success in 2002.
Although Al Gore won a half million more votes than George Bush in
2000, Bush carried 237 of current House districts, compared to only
198 for Gore. Gore won more votes than Bush in the combined total
among Florida, Michigan,
Ohio and Pennsylvania, but after having unfettered control of
redistricting in those states, Republicans now hold a whopping 51
out of 77 seats elected from those areas—including 18 of 25 seats in
Florida. Given that Democrats hold a majority of House seats in the
remaining 46 states, it's fair to say that the key elections for
House control were not in 2002, but in those states' 1998
gubernatorial elections swept by Republicans who then helped
dominate congressional redistricting.
But Republicans just may have overplayed their hand in their
relentless drive for a secure majority. This spring, Colorado
Republicans adopted a new plan to protect a vulnerable congressional
incumbent merely two days after its introduction. In Texas, things
reached truly wacky dimensions, involving the potentially illegal
use of federal agents to apprehend 51 Democratic state legislators
who had gone AWOL to prevent having a quorum that could enact the
redistricting. Republican Gov. Rick Perry convened special session
after special session until finally winning a plan designed to
switch seven seats to his party. Those high-profile shenanigans may
have been what spurred the Supreme Court to take the Vieth
challenge to the Republican gerrymander in Pennsylvania.
Gerrymandering is bad enough without the prospect of each new
legislative majority adjusting lines to protects its friends and
hurt their enemies after every election. But what this court might
do on redistricting is a great unknown.
Given its transparent conservative leanings, the court will have
to rise about the particulars in Pennsylvania to consider a standard
to reign in gerrymandering's worst abuses. The Vieth
plaintiffs propose as their standard that supporters of one
party should have a reasonable chance to elect a majority of seats
if their preferred candidates win a majority of the vote. That basic
democratic principle all too often can be violated by
gerrymandering, and certainly would be a strong start toward
sensible redistricting standards.
But it's only a start. The court is not expected to address
incumbent protection in redistricting, which arguably is the
greatest threat to fair elections. And certainly it is not going to
touch what is the best solution to the conundrum of how to provide
both competitive elections and fair representation: replacing
winner-take-all elections with full-representation electoral systems
in multi-seat districts, which makes voters rather than district
lines the key to defining representation. Ultimately we must win a
fair democracy in the political process. With voter turnout
plummeting, most of us living in thoroughly noncompetitive districts
and the "People's House" gerrymandered so that one party has
dominant control, we could cancel most legislative elections and few
would notice. In the 90's an angry public lashed out by voting
overwhelmingly for term limits. Now it's time for a drive to give
voters real choices, new voices and fair representation. It won't
happen without redistricting reform. |