New Yorker
The Great Election Grab When does gerrymandering
become a threat to democracy? By Jeffrey
Toobin December 8, 2003
With his West Texas twang, loping swagger, and
ever-present cowboy boots, Charlie Stenholm doesn’t much look like
or sound like anybody’s idea of a victim. Since 1979, he has been
the congressman for a sprawling district west of Dallas, and his
votes have reflected the conservative values of the cattle, cotton,
and oil country back home. He opposes abortion, fights for balanced
budgets, and voted for the impeachment of President Clinton. His Web
site features photographs of him carrying or firing guns. Through it
all, though, Stenholm has remained a member of the Democratic Party,
and for that offense he appears likely to lose his job after the
next election.
Stenholm was a principal target in one of the more bizarre
political dramas of recent years—the Texas redistricting struggle of
2003. Following the 2000 census, all states were obligated to redraw
the boundaries of their congressional districts in line with the new
population figures. In 2001, that process produced a standoff in
Texas, with the Republican state senate and the Democratic state
house of representatives unable to reach an agreement. As a result,
a panel of federal judges formulated a compromise plan, which more
or less replicated the current partisan balance in the state’s
congressional delegation: seventeen Democrats and thirteen
Republicans. Then, in the 2002 elections, Republicans took control
of the state house, and Tom DeLay, the Houston-area congressman who
serves as House Majority Leader in Washington, decided to reopen the
redistricting question. DeLay said that the current makeup of the
congressional delegation did not reflect the state’s true political
orientation, so he set out to insure that it did.
“This was a fundamental change in the rules of the game,” Heather
Gerken, a professor at Harvard Law School, said. “The rules were,
Fight it out once a decade but then let it lie for ten years. The
norm was very useful, because they couldn’t afford to fight this
much about redistricting. Given the opportunity, that is all they
will do, because it’s their survival at stake. DeLay’s tactic was so
shocking because it got rid of this old, informal agreement.” But
Texas law contained no explicit prohibition on mid-decade
redistricting, so the leadership of the state government, now
unified in Republican hands, tried during the summer of 2003 to push
through a new plan. Democrats attempted novel forms of resistance.
In May, fifty-one House members fled to Oklahoma, to deprive the new
leadership of a quorum; in July, a dozen senators decamped to New
Mexico, for the same purpose. But defections and the passage of time
weakened Democratic resolve, and, on October 13th, the plan
sponsored by DeLay was passed.
“They did everything they could to bust up my political base,”
Stenholm told me. “They drew my farm and where I grew up into the
Amarillo district, and they drew Abilene, where I live now, into the
Lubbock district.” As a result, Stenholm will be forced to run in
one of these districts if he wants to remain in the House. The new
map creates similar problems for half a dozen other incumbent Texas
Democrats, so the reapportionment may add as many as seven new
Republicans to the G.O.P. majority in the House of Representatives
and shift the state’s delegation to 22-10 in favor of the
Republicans. “Politics is a contact sport,” Stenholm said. “I’ve
been in this business twenty-five years. I will play the hand I was
dealt.”
In Texas and elsewhere, redistricting has transformed American
politics. The framers of the Constitution created the House of
Representatives to be the branch of government most responsive to
changes in the public mood, but gerrymandered districts mean that
most of the four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress never
face seriously contested general elections. In 2002, eighty-one
incumbents ran unopposed by a major party candidate. “There are now
about four hundred safe seats in Congress,” Richard Pildes, a
professor of law at New York University, said. “The level of
competitiveness has plummeted to the point where it is hard to
describe the House as involving competitive elections at all these
days.” The House isn’t just ossified; it’s polarized, too. Members
of the House now effectively answer only to primary voters, who
represent the extreme partisan edge of both parties. As a result,
collaboration and compromise between the parties have almost
disappeared. The Republican advantage in the House is modest—just
two hundred and twenty-nine seats to two hundred and six—but
gerrymandering has made the lead close to insurmountable for the
foreseeable future.
There is, it appears, just one chance to change the cycle. On
December 10th, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments
in a case that could alter the nature of redistricting—and, with it,
modern American electoral politics. The court has long held that
legislators may not discriminate on the basis of race in
redistricting, but the question now before the court is whether, or
to what extent, they may consider politics in defining congressional
boundaries. “There is a sense of embarrassment about what has
happened in American politics,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at
Columbia Law School, said. “The rules of decorum have fallen apart.
Voters no longer choose members of the House; the people who draw
the lines do. The court seems to think that something has to be
done.” The case could well become the court’s most important foray
into the political process since Bush v. Gore. As Ronald Klain, a
Democratic lawyer in election-law cases, puts it, “At stake in this
case is control of Congress—nothing more, nothing less.”
The off-cycle timing of the Texas redistricting fight,
as well as the farcical drama of the fleeing Democratic legislators,
made the saga look like a colorful aberration. But the results of
that altercation merely replicated what happened, after the 2000
census, in several other states where Republicans controlled the
governorship and the legislature. Even in states where voters were
evenly divided, the Republicans used their advantage in the state
capitals to transform their congressional delegations. In Florida,
the paradigmatically deadlocked state, the new district lines sent
eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats to the House. In the Gore
state of Michigan, which lost a seat in redistricting, the
delegation went from 9-7 in favor of the Democrats to 9-6 in favor
of the Republicans—even though Democratic congressional candidates
received thirty-five thousand more votes than their Republican
opponents in 2002. (The Michigan plan was approved on September 11,
2001, so it received little publicity.) Pennsylvania, which also
went to Gore, had one of the most ruthless Republican gerrymanders,
and it is the one being challenged before the Supreme Court.
After 2000, Pennsylvania lost two seats in Congress, and its
legislature had to establish new district lines. Republican
legislative leaders there engaged in no subterfuge; they candidly
admitted that they intended to draw the lines to favor their party
as much as possible. In the midst of the battle over the
Pennsylvania plan, DeLay and Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the
House, sent a letter to the Pennsylvania legislators, saying, “We
wish to encourage you in these efforts, as they play a crucial role
in maintaining a Republican majority in the United States House of
Representatives.” The Republicans in Harrisburg used venerable
techniques in redistricting, like “packing,” “cracking,” and
“kidnapping.” Packing concentrates one group’s voters in the fewest
possible districts, so they cannot influence the outcome of races in
others; cracking divides a group’s voters into other districts,
where they will be ineffective minorities; and kidnapping places two
incumbents from the same party in the same district.
Frank Mascara was kidnapped. A Democrat first elected to Congress
in 1994, Mascara represented a district in the rugged industrial
country south of Pittsburgh. “My district had been more or less the
same for about a hundred years,” Mascara told me on the porch of his
house in Charleroi, which overlooks a glass-making plant on the
banks of the Monongahela River. The son of a steelworker and the
first member of his family to go to college, Mascara worked his way
through county politics until he won his seat in the House. “A lot
of people couldn’t believe that a congressman lived in a house like
mine,” he said, noting its aluminum siding and probable resale value
of about thirty-five thousand dollars. “But that’s the kind of guy I
am,” he said. “I go to church down the street. I represent the
average person.”
With the Republicans in charge in Harrisburg, Mascara knew he
would be little more than a spectator to the redistricting process.
“I still thought my district would for the most part remain intact,”
he said. “That didn’t occur.” Mascara had met me at a McDonald’s in
Charleroi’s ragged downtown, and then led me to his home on a quiet
street called Lincoln Avenue, where we parked because he has no
garage. From his porch, he pointed to our cars. “The cars are in the
twelfth congressional district, and my house is in the eighteenth,”
he explained. “When they drew the new lines, they started in
Allegheny County, which is north of here, and made, like, a finger
out of that district, and the finger went down the middle of the
street where I live. The line came down to my house and stopped.”
The Republicans’ meticulous line-drawing through Charleroi was
designed to force Mascara into a primary battle with his
fellow-Democrat John Murtha, which it did. Murtha defeated Mascara,
ending his congressional career and reducing the Democratic presence
in the House by one.
The Republicans carved up Pennsylvania into many strangely shaped
districts, which won monikers like the “supine seahorse” and the
“upside-down Chinese dragon.” Such nicknames for gerrymandered
districts go back to the origin of the term, which was coined as an
epithet to mock Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1811
approved an election district that was said to resemble a
salamander. Like most gerrymanders throughout history, the
Republicans’ creation in Pennsylvania produced the desired results.
Even though a Democrat, Ed Rendell, won the governorship in 2002,
Republicans in that election took control of twelve of the nineteen
House seats.
Democrats accomplished less in the 2000 redistricting cycle only
because they controlled fewer states and thus could do less to
protect their interests. DeLay’s mid-cycle reapportionment may be
without precedent, but Democrats have their own inglorious history
of gerrymandering. Before the Texas coup this year, the most
notorious redistricting operation in recent years was the one run by
Representative Philip Burton, following the 1980 census in
California, which transformed the Democrats’ advantage in House
seats there from 22-21 to 27-18. In 2002, a Democratic plan in
Maryland turned that delegation from being evenly divided to a 6-2
Democratic advantage, and Georgia Democrats gained two seats in the
House even though in the same election voters rejected a Democratic
governor and a Democratic United States senator. In California,
where Democrats also controlled the process, they settled for
protecting incumbents of both parties. There, in 2002, not one of
fifty general-election House challengers won even forty per cent of
the total vote.
There is no doubt, though, that on balance the 2000 redistricting
cycle amounted to a major victory for Republicans. Even though Al
Gore and George W. Bush split the combined vote in Florida,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, Republican control of the process
meant that, after redistricting, the G.O.P. now holds fifty-one of
those states’ seventy-seven House seats. “The important thing to
realize was in 1991 the Republicans had control of line-drawing in a
total of five congressional districts,” one G.O.P. redistricting
expert told me. “In 2001, it was almost a hundred seats. Both
parties made the most of it.”
The transformation of congressional redistricting
began long before the 2000 census, and the crucial issue was race.
In the early nineteen-sixties, the Supreme Court, under Chief
Justice Earl Warren, transformed American politics by enforcing the
principle of one man, one vote, and requiring that all legislative
districts contain the same number of people. Before these decisions,
which started with the famous case of Baker v. Carr, in 1962,
Southern (and some Northern) states had designed districts so that
black voters had no meaningful say in Congress. Later in the decade,
the Voting Rights Act established the principle that not only did
blacks have the right to vote but they had to be placed in districts
where black candidates stood a good chance of winning. The act,
which was one of Lyndon B. Johnson’s most important civil-rights
initiatives, led to the election of many more black members of
Congress—and was a classic demonstration of the law of unintended
consequences.
“When the civil-rights movement started, you had a lot of white
Democrats in power in the South,” Bobby Scott, a congressman from
Virginia who was first elected in 1992, said. “And, when these white
Democrats started redistricting, they wanted to keep
African-American percentages at around thirty-five or forty per
cent. That was enough for the white Democrats to keep winning in
these districts, but not enough to elect any black Democrats. The
white Democrats called these ‘influence’ districts, where we could
have a say in who won.” But Republicans sensed an opportunity. “They
came to us and said, We want these districts to be sixty per cent
black,” Scott, who is African-American, said. “And blacks liked that
idea, because it meant we elected some of our own for the first
time. That’s where the ‘unholy alliance’ came in.”
The unholy alliance—between black Democrats and white
Republicans—shaped redistricting during the eighties and nineties.
Republicans recognized the value of concentrating black voters, who
are reliable Democrats, in single districts, which are known in
voting-rights parlance as “majority-minority.” As Gerald Hebert, a
Democratic redistricting operative and former Justice Department
lawyer, puts it, “What you had was the Republicans who were in
charge for every redistricting cycle at the Justice Department—’81,
’91, ’01. And there was a kind of thinking in the eighties and in
the early nineties that if you could create a majority-minority
district anywhere in the state, regardless of how it looked and what
its impact was on surrounding districts, then you simply had to do
it. What ended up happening was that they went out of their way to
divide and conquer the Democrats.” The real story of the Republican
congressional landslide of 1994, many redistricting experts believe,
is the disappearance of white Democratic congressmen, whose black
constituents were largely absorbed into majority-minority districts.
It was a version of the unholy alliance which may doom Charlie
Stenholm and his fellow Texas Democrats. All the congressmen who are
likely to lose their jobs in the new DeLay plan are white. Many of
their black constituents have been transferred to safe Democratic
seats, where they can’t harm Republicans. The unholy alliance has
had the additional side effect, especially in the South, of making
the Democrats the party of blacks and the Republicans the party of
whites—which presents daunting long-term political problems for the
Democratic Party. Many Democrats can’t help but express a perverse
admiration for the cleverness of the strategy. Benjamin Ginsberg, a
Republican redistricting operative who helped to construct the
unholy alliance during the 1990 cycle, referred to the initiative as
“Project Ratfuck.”
Since the 2000 cycle, these Republican gains have locked in and
even expanded. To see how this was done, I asked Nathaniel Persily,
a genial assistant professor of law and political science at the
University of Pennsylvania, to visit my office and bring his laptop.
Persily, who is thirty-three, has built a reputation as a
nonpartisan expert and occasional practitioner in the field of
redistricting.
Before 1990, most state legislators did their redistricting by
taking off their shoes and tiptoeing with Magic Markers around large
maps on the floor, marking the boundaries on overlaid acetate
sheets. Use of computers in redistricting began in the nineties,
and, as Persily demonstrated, it has now become a science. When
Persily opened his computer, he showed me a map of Houston, detailed
to the last census block. (The population of each block usually
ranges from fewer than a dozen to about a thousand.) “This is the
same map that DeLay’s people used to redistrict,” Persily said.
Indeed, DeLay’s political operation purchased ten copies of the
software, which is called Caliper’s Maptitude for Redistricting and
costs about four thousand dollars per copy. The software permits
mapmakers to analyze an enormous amount of data—party registration,
voting patterns, ethnic makeup from census data, property-tax
records, roads, railways, old district lines. “There’s only one
limit to the kind of information you can use in redistricting—its
availability,” Persily said. (In Pennsylvania, Republicans used
Carnegie-Mellon University’s mainframe computer, which would have
allowed them to add even more data, such as real-estate
transactions.)
With a few clicks, Persily changed the map from one that showed
party registration in each census block to one that revealed voting
results in each block. The colors ranged from dark red, for heavily
Democratic votes, to dark blue, for strongly Republican. He showed
voting results in about two dozen races, from President to governor
and from congressman to local offices. “The whole process has got
much more sophisticated,” Persily went on. “Party-registration data
are not the only kind of data you want to use. You want to use real
election results. That’s a big change from ten years ago. We have
become very good at predicting how people are going to vote.
People’s partisanship is at a thirty-year high. If I know you voted
for Gore, I am better able to predict that you are going to vote for
any given Democrat in a future election.”
I asked Persily to give me a demonstration of how to draw
district lines. He moved his mouse to the border between two
congressional districts. A ledger on the top half of the screen
showed that one of the districts, as currently configured, had about
forty thousand more people than the other one. “The Supreme Court
has said that the requirement of one man, one vote means that each
district must have exactly—exactly—the same number of people,”
Persily explained. An early version of the Pennsylvania plan was
rejected by the courts because the districts were just nineteen
voters apart, in districts of about a half million people.
Requirements for that sort of precision virtually mandate the use of
computers for redistricting.
Persily zeroed in even more closely, and a little donkey popped
up inside one of the census blocks. “That’s where the local
congressman lives, a Democrat,” he explained. “We have little
elephants for the Republican incumbents.” The program seemed easy to
use, justifying the boast, on the software company’s Web site, that
you could “start building plans thirty minutes after opening the
box.” Persily chuckled. “At a certain point, you admire the
video-game appeal of all this.
“There used to be a theory that gerrymandering was
self-regulating,” Persily explained. “The idea was that the more
greedy you are in maximizing the number of districts your party can
control, the more likely it is that a small shift of votes will lead
you to lose a lot of districts. But it’s not self-regulating
anymore. The software is too good, and the partisanship is too
strong.”
The effects of partisan gerrymandering go well beyond
the protection of incumbents and the guarantee of continued
Republican control. It has also changed the kind of people who win
seats in Congress and the way they behave once they arrive. Jim
Leach, a moderate Republican and fourteen-term congressman from
Iowa, has watched the transformation. Leach agrees with Richard
Pildes on the numbers: “A little less than four hundred seats are
totally safe, which means that there is competition between
Democrats and Republicans only in about ten or fifteen per cent of
the seats.
“So the important question is who controls the safe seats,” Leach
said. “Currently, about a third of the over-all population is
Democrat, a third is Republican, and a third is no party. If you ask
yourself some mathematical questions, what is half of a
third?—one-sixth. That’s who decides the nominee in each district.
But only a fourth participates in primaries. What is a fourth of a
sixth? A twenty-fourth. So it’s one twenty-fourth of the population
that controls the seat in each party.
“Then you have to ask who are those people who vote in
primaries,” Leach went on. “They are the real partisans, the
activists, on both sides. A district that is solidly Republican is a
district that is more likely to go to the more conservative side of
the Republican part of the Party for candidates and platforms.
Presidential candidates go to the left or the right in the primaries
and then try to get back in the center. In House politics, if your
district is solidly one party, your only challenge is from within
that party, so you have every incentive for staying to the more
extreme side of your party. If you are Republican in an
all-Republican district, there is no reason to move to the center.
You want to protect your base. You hear that in Congress all the
time, in both parties—‘We’ve got to appeal to our base.’ It’s much
more likely that an incumbent will lose a primary than he will a
general election. So redistricting has made Congress a more
partisan, more polarized place. The American political system today
is structurally geared against the center, which means that the
great majority of Americans feel left out of the decision-making
process.”
Scholarly research gives some support to Leach’s impressions.
“Partisan gerrymandering skews not only the positions congressmen
take but also who the candidates are in the first place,”
Issacharoff, of Columbia, said. “You get more ideological
candidates, the people who can arouse the base of the party, because
they don’t have to worry about electability. It’s becoming harder to
get things done, whether in Congress or in state legislatures,
because partisan redistricting goes on at the state level, too.”
Among members of the House, partisan redistricting has also bred an
almost comic sense of entitlement to landslides. In a hearing on the
post-2000 reapportionment in New York, Representative Benjamin
Gilman, an upstate Republican, said that during the 1982
redistricting he was promised by the majority leader of the state
senate that “if I accepted that challenge of a fair-fight district,
I would never again be asked or forced by the state to face that
prospect of a fair fight once again. . . . I think it would be
unfair not only to myself and my district to face that divisive
prospect once again.”
With partisan gerrymandering, House members in effect pay a
penalty if they reach out too much to members of the other party.
“What is laughable is the basic premise of what is going on,”
Charlie Stenholm, the endangered Texan, said. “The great sin I
committed is that I won the last election 51-47 in a district that
went 71-28 for President Bush. But I am a conservative Democrat, and
that’s why these people vote for me. There shouldn’t be a penalty
for reaching out across party lines.” If Stenholm and his ilk
disappear, they will be replaced by reliable Republicans—who won’t
have to worry about their own chances for reëlection.
The question before the Supreme Court later this month
is not whether partisan gerrymandering is wise but whether it is
constitutional. The issues are strikingly similar to those faced by
the Warren Court in the early sixties—and the stakes may be as large
as well. The framers of the Constitution designed the House of
Representatives to reflect the popular will. James Madison, in the
Federalist Papers, said the House was meant to be a “numerous and
changeable body,” where the members would have “an habitual
recollection of their dependence on the people.” While the House was
supposed to be impetuous, the Senate was intended to be stable.
Madison said that senators would serve six-year terms as a defense
against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the House,
and the members of the Senate were to be elected by state
legislators, providing a further level of insulation from the
popular will. (The Constitution was amended to require direct
election of senators in 1913.) The Senate had to remain stable,
Madison wrote, because “every new election in the states is found to
change one half of the representatives.”
Today, the House and the Senate have precisely flipped roles.
Senate races, which are not subject to redistricting, are decided by
actual voters, who do indeed change their minds with some
regularity. Control of the Senate has shifted five times since the
nineteen-eighties. The House, by contrast, has changed hands just
once in the same period, in the Republican takeover of 1994. In
2002, only one out of twelve House elections was decided by ten or
fewer percentage points, while half of the governors’ and Senate
races were that close. In 2002, only four House challengers defeated
incumbents in the general election—a record low in the modern era.
In a real sense, the voters no longer select the members of the
House of Representatives; the state legislators who design the
districts do.
The question, then, is what, if anything, is unlawful about that?
The legal debate on that question is especially stark. In the case
now before the Supreme Court, Pennsylvania Democrats argued that the
Republican gerrymander denied them equal protection of the laws,
asserting in their brief that it is “unconstitutional to give a
State’s million Republicans control over ten seats while leaving a
million Democrats with control over five.” The Republican response
is to say, in effect, “Welcome to the big leagues. State
legislatures have always played this kind of hardball, the courts
ought to stay out of the game altogether, and there’s no such thing
as a nonpartisan solution.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a former
Arizona state senator herself, may have put the argument best when,
in the mid-eighties, the Supreme Court last considered a
political-gerrymandering case. According to Justice William
Brennan’s notes of the court’s internal debate, O’Connor said that
any legislative leader who failed to protect his party’s interest in
redistricting “ought to be impeached.”
In that case, a challenge to the congressional-reapportionment
plan in Indiana following the 1980 census, a plurality of the
justices said for the first time that a partisan gerrymander might,
in theory, violate the equal-protection clause. But in the 1986
decision the court ruled that the Indiana plan did not violate the
Constitution. Indeed, the court said that the Constitution was not
violated unless one political party was “essentially shut out of the
political process.” According to Heather Gerken, of Harvard, “The
court set the bar so high for constitutional violations that no one
has ever successfully fought a partisan gerrymander anywhere since
1986. Political parties are never totally ‘shut out’ of the
process—they raise funds, put up candidates, make speeches. So these
challenges have always lost. By taking the Pennsylvania case, the
court seems to be saying that it’s time to get back in the
process.”
The best argument for Republicans in the Pennsylvania case, it
seems, is that it’s simply not the court’s business to scrutinize
legislative maps for partisan gerrymandering. “Redistricting deals
with inherently political questions,” J. Bart DeLone, the senior
deputy state attorney general who will argue for the case for
Pennsylvania, said, “and those questions should be left to the
political branches of government, where they belong, not to the
courts. Then you are trying to measure things that have no standards
unless you are making political judgments.” Still, this is a Supreme
Court that has not hesitated to tell politicians what to do. “It’s
an extremely confident court,” Gerken said. “They second-guess
Congress, states, state judges all the time. They are deeply engaged
in the democratic process. I can’t imagine that this is anything but
an effort to pull in the reins of partisan gerrymandering.”
But how? The Democrats propose a rule based, in part, on the
Court’s race jurisprudence. In a series of cases in the nineties
which challenged some of the majority-minority districts, the Court
held that it violated the Constitution for states to gerrymander
congressional districts exclusively for racial reasons. “The rule
now is, You can’t draw ugly districts if it’s purely for race,” Sam
Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the Pennsylvania Democrats, said.
“The rule should be, You can’t draw ugly districts if it’s purely
for politics, either.” But Hirsch’s adversary, DeLone, pointed out,
“There is a fundamental difference between race and politics. Racial
classifications are inherently suspect. If you are doing something
specifically because of race, we are always going to take a hard
look at it. Not only are political judgments O.K. but we expect
them.” Since it’s been so long since the Supreme Court addressed the
issue, most election-law experts see the Pennsylvania case as
difficult to handicap, and the key factor may simply be how bad the
justices believe the problem of partisan gerrymandering to be.
In any case, the situation appears to be getting worse, even as
the Pennsylvania case has been pending. While Texas was shifting its
districts, the governing Republicans in Colorado did their own
mid-cycle reapportionment, to solidify their hold on the one House
seat in the state that produced a close election in 2002. (Legal
challenges to the new Texas and Colorado districts are now pending.)
At one point, the Democrats who control Oklahoma and New Mexico
threatened retaliation, but the Party lacks a DeLay-like figure to
press the issue. One state that has gone its own way is Iowa, which
turned redistricting over to a nonpartisan civil-service commission
after the 2000 census. Consequently, four of Iowa’s five House races
in 2002 were competitive, so a state with one per cent of the seats
in the House produced ten per cent of the nation’s close elections.
The rest of the country will follow only, it seems, if the Supreme
Court requires it.
When it comes to drawing political boundaries, there never was a
golden age of statesmanship. “When we Democrats controlled the
legislature, sure we protected Democrats,” Charlie Stenholm said.
“But we didn’t do harm to the Republicans who were in office. This
thing today is a whole different order of magnitude.” On his porch
in Charleroi, Frank Mascara said the issue is a lot bigger than he
is. “I’m through, I’m done, out of politics,” he said. “It won’t
affect me one way or the other. But the system is now totally out of
whack, and that matters to a lot of people. It’s not about me, it’s
about power on a national scale.”
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