On Gerrymandering

In his comments on my "Explaination of the dispute" post, Dave Pollard raised some excellent questions, which I thought I'd go ahead and try to answer here on the main page.

OK, let me get this straight. It's not illegal to gerrymander in the most outrageously partisan manner as long as it isn't overtly racial, but it is illegal for a state representative to walk out in protest over gerrymandering. I'm sorry, but you've got one royally *&$%&^'d up poltical system. No wonder your supreme court had to appoint a president. How and why do you put up with this? Isn't somebody agitating to make the electoral process fair?

If I understand it right, yes, it's not illegal to gerrymander unless it's overtly racial (and if I'm wrong on that, someone PLEASE correct me!) - though there are court cases being brought to try and change that; and yes, in Texas, at any rate, legislators who try to break a quorum can be arrested and returned to the capitol floor. And, yes, it's totally insane.

As for why we put up with it, well, near as I can tell, gerrymandering is considered something of a time-honoured tradition, and I'm not sure who, exactly, would have the legal standing to challenge it. Seriously, I have no clue why we put up with it. Luckily, the district I'm in, while including a fairly diverse population, doesn't seem to have been created for purely political purposes, and we flip back and forth from electing Republican representatives to Democrats on a semi-regular basis.

I do think that there are some who are agitating to make the electoral process fair, but, sadly, to me, at any rate, it seems like people are less interested in assuring a basic fairness to the electoral system than they are in various other issues - which may be one reason we let the politicians get away with it. In the example of Texas, people who support the conservative Republican agenda aren't going to be concerned that this new redistricting plan would give the Republicans a huge and unfair advantage by wiping out most of the Democrat-leaning districts. They're going to be more in favour of the idea that with more Republican represeantatives, they can get more of the Republican agenda passed, and that's pretty much all they care about.

Posted by thorswitch at May 13, 2003 02:28 PM | TrackBack