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Bee, Bergen
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publications
Note: Gerrymandering is a bipartisan scandal. The
Center for Voting and Democracy has been critical of both major
parties for their nearly universal tendency to put partisanship and
incumbent protection over the public interest. Republican abuses
have only been the most recent -- not necessarily the most
egregious.
GOP
gerrymandering creates American apartheid By Steve Hill and Rob
Richie October 2003
Led by U.S. House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay and Bush political mastermind Karl Rove, Texas
Republicans have completed their ambush of congressional Democrats.
After Delay spent three days huddled in private conferences with
bickering Republican legislators, they gerrymandered U.S. House
districts in order to knock off as many as seven Democratic
incumbents - and help secure Republican dominance of the House of
Representatives for a decade. For months, Texas Republicans
tried to re-open the can of worms known as redistricting in an
unprecedented series of special sessions. Twice Democratic
legislators fled the state to block a quorum. But power-hungry
Republicans were relentless, and now they've finally crushed
Democratic opposition. The battle moves to the courts and the
Department of Justice, but it's unlikely that the carefully vetted
map will be overturned. Simply by rejiggering district
lines in Texas, Republicans have padded their slim majority in the
U.S. House so that they can even more brazenly avoid any need to
work with House Democrats - or even moderate Republicans. Their
dominance has little to do with how many votes they win, or how
popular Republican candidates are, either nationally or in Texas.
It's much more the power of computers and databases to slice and
dice the electorate, creating precisely crafted "designer districts"
for the candidates of the party in power. Just as
perniciously, the GOP plan is designed to wipe out nearly every
moderate and white Democrat from the Texas congressional delegation.
For instance, long-time Democratic House leader Martin Frost has
been drawn out of a seat that is now 63 percent Republican. Richard
Murray, a professor of political science at the University of
Houston, predicted that the GOP plan eventually will leave Texas
without a single white majority district represented by a
Democrat. "This plan basically envisions all Democrats
elected to Congress being either from Hispanic-majority or
African-American-majority districts," Professor Murray said.
And yet voting rights advocates aren't happy with DeLay's redistricting
plan either. People of color were underrepresented in the
old congressional map and had a legitimate case for increased representation.
But even if minorities now pick up one seat, which is
possible, it will come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Latino
and African-American voters now being "represented" by conservative
Republicans rather than by more like-minded Democrats. In
essence, the Republicans have sinisterly manipulated the
winner-take-all districts to pit the electoral opportunities
of people of color against white moderate Democrats. Texas
is just the tip of the rather gnarly iceberg of gerrymandering.
With Republicans at a state level having controlled
redistricting in such big states as Florida, Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and now Texas, GOP leaders have encouraged
attempts to draw districts that not only get rid of white Democrats,
but also moderate Republicans. The nationwide result has been
nothing less than titanic. Increasingly, the House is polarized by
representatives considerably to the left or right of most of the
state's voters, even as the political center of the House
has moved sharply rightward. Safe seats have become the rule,
two-party politics is dead in most districts, and entire regions of
Red and Blue America have become balkanized one-party fiefdoms.
Most alarmingly, these monumental shifts are cemented in for the
foreseeable future. Nationwide, very few of the 435 House
districts have any chance of changing parties anytime soon.
Only four House incumbents lost to challengers in 2002, and fewer
than one in ten races were decided by less than 10 percent. And it
will get worse throughout the decade. Will Texans really
benefit from a polarized congressional delegation of 22 conservative
white Republicans and 10 liberal minority Democrats, as the DeLay
plan envisions? Do Texans really want a state with a "white party"
and a "racial minority party?" Is that good for Texas, or any other
state? In South Africa, they used to call that apartheid.
South Africa, ironically, provides the best solution to this
dilemma. Post-apartheid South Africa adopted a "full
representation" voting method in multi-seat districts - one that
allows voters of all political persuasions and races to
control and define their representation, not the map-makers. If
Texas elected its U.S. House delegation by a full representation
method like ones already used by such cities as Peoria, Illinois,
and Amarillo, Texas, a broader political spectrum would be elected.
Representation of people of color would not be pitted against white,
moderate Democrats. Instead, DeLay, Rove, and the GOP have
engineered our antiquated winner-take-all system to create a new
kind of apartheid of representation. This cannot help but further
undermine confidence in our already shaky political system.
Steven Hill is a senior analyst at the Center for
Voting and Democracy (www.fairvote.org) and author of "Fixing
Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics"
(Routledge Press, www.FixingElections.com). Rob Richie is executive
director of the Center. Send your comments on this article to [email protected]
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