Supreme Court Favors Republican Gerrymandering of Texas
Interesting how a word can change over time, isn’t it; like the term “Gerrymander,” which used to be pejorative. However, today, our Republican dominated Supreme Court has upheld the Gerrymandering of Texas accomplished by Tom Delay last year. I won’t detail the new and bizarre map of Texas though it looks something like a butcher’s chart for chopping up a Texas steer. It’s composed of hundreds of square miles of wiggly zigzagging real estate in which some districts nearly bisect others. Instead,Kathy Gill does a marvelous job of dissecting the ungainly critter.
The eye-popping horror bothers me because this court’s decision paves the way forredistricting willy-nilly any time a state congress becomes dominated by one or the other of the two parties. It means that before the next election many Red state congresses will attempt to Gerrymander their own states in hopes of retaining their Republican majority despite the popular vote. It means that we may be seeing the end of the Two Party System. Damn! I hope I’m over reacting.
Why ever did we elect a Republican Congress, Senate, and President at the national level in the first place? Are we “Amurcans” - as our President pronounces the word - unable to connect the dots? The United States President gets to appoint Supreme Court justices. A Republican President elected for two terms appointed two new and extremely conservative justices thus creating a Supremely conservative Supreme Court. A Republican Congress, Senate, President and Supreme Court means that the checks and balances the forefathers designed into the structure of our government no longer exist.
If any of you out there feel that the government is running rough shod over you, you’re right. It is! And now, with this new Supreme Court ruling, it may continue to do so ad infinitum, ad nausium.
The eye-popping horror bothers me because this court’s decision paves the way forredistricting willy-nilly any time a state congress becomes dominated by one or the other of the two parties. It means that before the next election many Red state congresses will attempt to Gerrymander their own states in hopes of retaining their Republican majority despite the popular vote. It means that we may be seeing the end of the Two Party System. Damn! I hope I’m over reacting.
Why ever did we elect a Republican Congress, Senate, and President at the national level in the first place? Are we “Amurcans” - as our President pronounces the word - unable to connect the dots? The United States President gets to appoint Supreme Court justices. A Republican President elected for two terms appointed two new and extremely conservative justices thus creating a Supremely conservative Supreme Court. A Republican Congress, Senate, President and Supreme Court means that the checks and balances the forefathers designed into the structure of our government no longer exist.
If any of you out there feel that the government is running rough shod over you, you’re right. It is! And now, with this new Supreme Court ruling, it may continue to do so ad infinitum, ad nausium.
posted by Isaac at 5:15 PM
1 Comments:
"Gerrymandering" is still used as a pejorative, though it's true that its overuse as a pejorative has made it lose some of its original meaning over time. Redistricting for political advantage is as old as redistricting, but the term "gerrymander" really shouldn't apply where the laws respecting redistricting haven't been broken and where the districts have not been drawn in truly unusual ways.
The Texas map isn't any more contorted than it was in 1990 after the Democrat then-majority carved up Texas to their own advantage (they did it so well that they maintained majority House representation even after the judicial redistricting that occurred in Texas after the 2000 census.
Get some commonsense laws that prevent nutty district lines, enforce those laws, and partisan line-drawing shouldn't be that big a deal--though I think that maybe there should be a limit on how often redistricting may be done. Every two years would seem to allow too much advantage to the party in power given the precise manner in which districts may be carved to confer electoral advantage.
Post a Comment
<< Home