The Democratic party should unilaterally disarm on gerrymandering prior to the redistricing after the 2010 census. I mean, I'd like the Republicans to stop also, just as much, but I don't see how i's going to stop unless one party does it first.
It could be done simultaneously through federal law (although I don't know about the constitutional issues). Mandate some kind of compactness rule accross all 50 states?
I'd say it's expectation-lowering. It would be nice to take the house back, but there just aren't enough strong candidates challenging incumbent Republicans to flip control. There will probably be some gains for the Democrats, but I expect to hear a lot of talk about how this is to be expected, that the party in the White House historically loses seats in the mid-term elections.
What I was thinking is that a few weeks ago, I don't think this would have been in the realm of sane-sounding expectation lowering.
I don't see unilateral disarmament as making any sense at all. Unilateral disarmament = GOP control.
Anything else = either tons of mid-decade redistricing OR no change from the status quo of really pernicious gerrymandering until 2020.
My rationale here isn't "clean hands" for my party, I just think that's the second-best option, as opposed to the difficult-to-impossible complete disarmarment. I also think (hope?) that some voters can be gained, both in gerrymandered and neutrally districted states, by having candidates mention their party's fairness on this issue, and the other's deck-stacking.
According to Tradesports, the GOP has about a 46% chance of retaining control of the House.
Three months ago, they gave the GOP a better than 70% chance of retaining control.
I'd bet it's a combination of expectation-lowering and real worry.
RedState.com is showing signs of splintering and fatigue. For one thing, fewer diaries are being posted. They've gone around and around on immigration--with the hysterical "Bush is a liberal who wants to grant amnesty to the Reconquistadors!" crowd drowning out the more pragmatic partisans. They've tried to target a few House races to intervene in, a la Daily Kos, but I don't get a sense that people are all that excited about even the few selected races. There've been a few conversations in comments about bothering to vote at all.
RedState isn't exactly the pulse of the nation, or even the base, but it's an interesting marker.
I also think (hope?) that some voters can be gained, both in gerrymandered and neutrally districted states, by having candidates mention their party's fairness on this issue, and the other's deck-stacking.
You left out "peace, love, and understanding."
There are constitutional and practical issues to a quick Federal fix to gerrymandering, but I also think that more than campaign finance reform or changing the Electoral College or all the other structural changes people talk about, ending gerrymandering would be a real and valuable structural change that could result in all sorts of benefits to the process. Of course, one problem with a fix is even though we might agree that gerrymandering shoud be ended, we might not agree on what the fix looks like. One step at a time, I guess.
This article in your hometown rag seems to indicate that in some close seats—there is, as is characteristic of that utterly useless paper, no systematic analysis—there really is a likelihood of shifting.
Well, leaving aside the constitutional issues, what would be the problems with a federal statute mandating: (1) some compactness requirement -- a upper limit on the perimeter/area ratio for districts -- and (2) districts to be set by a non-partisan commission on the Iowa model. The first requirement alone is objective, and solves most of the problem by itself.
re: 13
leaving aside the constitutional issues
Leaving them to one side (and I think there may be several), the criticism I have of your proposal is that it ignores one of the important things lost in the era of one-man one-vote and racial gerrymandering, and that is the notion of community. I agree that such things elude exact definition, but it is possible to identify communities--towns, neighborhoods, etc. that have a community of political interest. I would try to create political boundaries that reflect the economic/social/political interests of their residents. I suppose a compactness rule is a great start, but communities may be contiguous, but they are not always compact.
<unabashed ignorance>Is there any conventionally cited legal, or political-philosophical position on the appropriate construction of electoral districts, whether in the UK or in America? Is there something in the Federalist that I don't know about?</unabashed ignorance>
(or maybe I should leave that tag open and save myself a lot of trouble)
My sense is that the short answer is "No". "Gerrymandering" is a very old word -- Elbridge Gerry's eponymous district is from the 1810 redistricting. I don't think, though, that it was discussed as a serious problem until recent decades, when it has become obvious exactly how powerful a tool it can be.
(I could be wrong -- there might be lots of stuff out there -- but I don't remember it from law scholl if it exists.)
the criticism I have of your proposal is that it ignores... the notion of community..
Who cares? We can gather around the campfire and sing Kumbaya some day other than election day. Hippie.
(1) some compactness requirement -- a upper limit on the perimeter/area ratio for districts -- and (2) districts to be set by a non-partisan commission on the Iowa model. The first requirement alone is objective, and solves most of the problem by itself.
Not that this is an insuperable problem, but (on certain assumptions) the length of a coastline tends to infinity as the accuracy of measurement increases. Mandlebrot's first paper on fractals was titled "How Long is the Coast of Britain?"
Well, that's true for natural coastlines. Districts can have straight edges (and where natural features, like rivers and coastlines come into it, they can be measured at some desired level of accuracy making the system work.)
On the community thing -- there's no requirement now that communities be respected, and often they aren't. I'd be fine with putting 'respecting community identity' as a value on which to choose between acceptably compact redistricting schemes, but I can't see giving up all that much for it.
15: I'll check later. For now, it's worth reading (though it doesn't direcltly answer your question) Stevens' Karcher concurrence (scroll down at the link) or Powell's Bandemer concurrence which I can't find online.
19: There's also an issue that one's community of interest for federal elections will frequently not be the community in which one resides. One may care far more about how represents the district where one works, for example.
I should not have italicized the word "concurrence" either time.
one of the important things lost in the era of one-man one-vote and racial gerrymandering... is the notion of community
This does not make sense to me. The exact stated goal of racial gerrymandering is to put people with common interests in districts together. Isn't it? Seems to me like that would further the notion of community.
one-man one-vote
OK, absolutely nobody's against that, right? The Senate gives us quite enough of not-this, thank you. (And yes, it's immune from gerrymandering, unless you count the permanent overrepresentation of rural states.)
Not really. The problem isn't so much the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting the dilution of the electoral power of racial minorities in covered jurisdictions, it's the combination of those requirements with partisan gerrymandering.
If you just wanted to, say, maintain the number of majority-minority districts in a given state, that wouldn't be terribly difficult to do in a manner that would allow for the respecting of communities and for reasonably compact districts. When you try to do that at the same time as you conduct an extreme partisan gerrymandering, you end up with freakishly serpentine districts picking up teeny little minority areas all over the state.
OK, absolutely nobody's against that, right?
Originalists often are, and to be fair, it's not explicitly set forth in the Constitution. I don't have any trouble getting there from the Equal Protection Clause myself, but it's an actual area of discussion.
one-man one-vote OK, absolutely nobody's against that, right?
I am. For example, it used to be OK for states to make their legislatures just like the Federal government--one house with proportional representation and one with georgraphic (town, county, whatever) representation. Even though the Federal government still can do it, the Supreme court decided that States could not (even though they had done so for almost 200 years).
Further, States cannot experiment with alternative voting schemes, some of which would provide greater political voice to political minorities, because it violates one-man one-vote.
To be sure, I do not imagine anyone wants to return to pocket boroughs, such as England used to have. But one-man one-vote creates an inflexibility which is not found in the Constitution and which interferes with other important political values.
OK, absolutely nobody's against [one-man one-vote], right?
I hate to give a technical answer to a simple question, but I'm going to: Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v. Sims, and Wesberry v. Sander are all certainly correctly decided.
The second graph in 26 is misleading, cumulative voting is in use in many elections below state-level, with state approval.
I am less sure that Forty Fourth General Assembly of Colorado v. Lucas was. That is, I think it may have been ok for Colorado voters, in a referendum which won a majority in every district of the state, to choose to over-represent rural regions of the state and correpsondingly under-represent urban voters.
The exact stated goal of racial gerrymandering is to put people with common interests in districts together.
The exact stated goal of racial gerrymandering is to put a majority of people with the same color skin in a district. It is based on the assumption that you can tell what is most important about people and what their primary interests are by looking at the color of their skin.
The exact stated goal of racial gerrymandering is to put a majority of people with the same color skin in a district.
No, the exact stated goal of the relevant provisions of the Voting Rights Act that result in what you are characterizing as racial gerrymandering is to prevent the dilution of the electoral power of racial minorities. As you may recall, the law was passed at a time at which such intentional dilution was common.
It is based on the assumption that you can tell what is most important about people and what their primary interests are by looking at the color of their skin.
As opposed to, what, the assumption that geography is the dominant factor in determining interests?
28 -- Clearly you have a better method in mind of telling what is most important about people and what their primary interests are.
the exact stated goal of the relevant provisions of the Voting Rights Act
True, of course, but beside the point. The voting Rights Act does not require racial gerrymandering.
Well, then what 'stated goal' are you talking about? Racial gerrymandering happens for lots of reasons -- in sincere attempts to comply with the VRA, and in partisan gerrymanders where race and party affiliation can often be used as very good proxies for each other. If you're going to snipe at 'stated goals', it might be helpful to point out what statements, by whom, you are thinking of.
re: 30 and 31
better method in mind of telling what is most important about people and what their primary interests are.
There are many factors which determine what is important to people and what a community is. Certainly, shared history and experience are one, but there are many. What I disagree with is the notion that skin color trumps all, which if you have seen what they used to do (until the Supreme Court finally curtailed it) in terms of racial gerrymandering, is pretty extreme.
If the House election is nationalised as a 'kick out the bums' vote, then even gerrymandered districts might fall. It's definitely an expectations game right now, but you never know. A stay-at-home electorate in an off-year can make a big difference.
Now, if the 50-state strategy has any impact, it will mean that state legislatures (with smaller districts that are harder to gerrymander as effectively) may change hands.
If it's not obvious, the sentence in 27 that beings: The second graph in 26 is... should have been after the one about Lucas, but when I wrote in on preview I put it in the wrong spot.
36 isn't so well-formatted either. Fuck to oboe.
Gordon' Wood's Creation of the American Republic has some very interesting discussions of representation. If you're into that whole "what people at the time were thinking about between 1776 and 1787" kind of thing.
I don't know why there's an extra "'" in 38.
Also on the topic of "what people at the time were thinking," although not about representation per se, I've picked up David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom, subtitled "A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas," but haven't read it yet.
Gordon' Wood's Creation of the American Republic
I remember the discussion of representation as having to do with whether the legislature was to mirror the people in all their respects, or whether it was to provide a body of responsible deliberating members whose principle task was to serve as a sane check on the executive. I don't remember this discussion turning specifically on how to draw districts. Am I wrong about that?
(Notice, I'm trying not to revisit the actual book.)
I've got a great casebook on this stuff on my shelf at home -- I'll give it a look tonight and see what, if anything, it mentions on districting from that era. I suspect that w/d has a later edition of the same casebook, so if he wanted to look at it first, I wouldn't bother.
I do have the second edition (and the 2005 supplement) and I was planning to look when I get home. One thing I remember is:
In 1842 (I think, maybe later) Congress mandated the use of districted, as opposed to at-large, elections for the House. Early on, many smaller states were using at-large, and because they would end up with a unitied slate of reps, had more power than their population would indicate. Larger states, noticing this, decided to also move to at-large, and in order to prevent this Congress passed that law.
5: I'm consistently impressed by the GOP's ability to make folks swallow things that I wouldn't think could possibly sound sane.
Re the post itself--When that numerical disadvantage gets too great, on the other hand, a lot of those narrow-majority districts can flip all at once. I just hadn't thought we were anywhere close to that point yet.--you know, just the other day I talked to a friend, whose politics I'm actually unsure of. But I do know that his boyfriend is a hard, hard core Republican. Now, maybe "gay Republican" isn't your typical R. voter, but seriously, I've met very few people who are as intelligent yet right-wing as this guy. And my friend, when I teased him by asking if his bf was still happy with the prez, said, "let's just say that he's very disappointed with the president right now."
I think it's possible that a lot of those narrow districts are ready to flip, if that kind of thing is going on.
41: I probably will be revisiting the book (I'm not sure when), but along with the general discussion of whether to mirror the people, I remember there being specifics about how that mirroring should take place: should every town be represented individually? draw new boundaries?, etc. A lot of it was about state constitutions, too.