There isn’t much that I ever liked about Arnold Schwarzenegger being elected Governor of California. It seemed a perfect illustration of what is wrong with American politics, namely voting for pandering individuals rather than policies or ideology.
However, there is something Schwarzenegger was trying to do that actually had a great deal of merit, a plan I am sad to say, will no longer be on the ballot in the state (a state appeals court refused to allow it on a technicality). The ballot initiative Schwarzenegger wanted would, if passed by the citizens of California, take away state lawmakers' power to draw congressional and legislative boundaries in California and instead shift that responsibility to a panel of retired judges.
The proposal is an intelligent one and something I would enjoy seeing duplicated across the country. Gerrymandering, of course, is nothing new (the word itself dates back to 1811 when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry drew districts so intricate and “salamander-like,” one cartoonist described it as a “Gerrymander”). For much of the 20th century, the major concern over redistricting has been racial gerrymandering, or drawing district lines to make it almost impossible for minorities to win elections. Of course, whenever one party holds power, there has always been the subtle attempt to draw the lines most favorable to particular parties. Recently however, these partisan gerrymandering tricks have become a lot less subtle and a lot more blatant.
Perhaps the most famous recent example of this was Texas Republicans, who successfully re-drew congressional districts to eliminate Democratic seats and ensure Republican domination of the state. States must redraw boundaries every 10 years to reflect population shifts found during the census, but what Texas (and other Republican states) have tried to do is force district drawing more frequently than once a decade, to make more seats winnable for members of their party.
However, Texas is the exception precisely because of its boldness. Other partisans are a bit slyer about it. Take Pennsylvania, for example. As a whole, PA is pretty much split between both parties (Gore and Kerry both carried the state and now has a Democratic Governor) and yet both houses of the legislature and the statehouse were in Republican hands when these bodies set about redistricting after the 2000 census. As a result, these bodies were able to create relatively safe seats for Republicans in nearly two thirds of the state's federal districts. Thus, a state that is actually about one-half Republican is represented as if it were about two-thirds Republican. The following legal commentary has more to say on this issue, including the following: “If Pennsylvanians' party preferences were truly taken into account, the State should have 9 or 10 Republican representatives. Now, however, they are virtually certain to have 12 or more. That's not democracy; it's an outrage.”
Schwarzenegger is not alone in trying to change this undemocratic power-grab. In Ohio, numerous groups are trying to do the same thing, and for good reason. The current system of drawing district lines are too partisan and too corrupt. The only possible solution would be to put the process in the hands of people who are the closest to we may justifiably call “neutral” as we can get in our modern society: judges. Of course, this is no guarantee that the process will be fair, but I will take a Republican-appointed judge over a Republican legislator whose job and success are on the line any day.
Another Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, once said that “No congressional district should be safe because of the way it is drawn. It should be safe because the congressman represents the interests of the people in that district.” For too long, this problem has been immune from scrutiny. It is time to put legislatures in the hands of the people rather than the hands of current office-holders.
3 comments:
Of course, the most effective way to end gerrymandering and ensure an accurate reflection of party representation is with the states as single constituency districts. The downside is it makes the body in question moreso a mere function of the parties. The upside is that as a non-parliamentary, bicameral government, we have other bodies of government where individual leadership, as opposed political leadership, matters. I think the tie-breaking consideration in my little pro-con list here is that few people give a damn who the person is that represents them in the umpteenth district in the state of pandemonium.
Majoritarian voting has its places but it is over-used in this country. Mixed systems should distinguish the reasons for which we consider individual leadership as a separate issue from the philosophical evolution of parties - the latter of which is so sorely lacking in American politics.
It is clear that we need to remove the prospect of politically-driven redistricting between terms. What it will take, however, is for a barely democratic-majority state to create a few safe districts in similar fashion to make people take notice. Why, after all, would Texas Republicans want to sit back, with all of the advantages of incumbency, and say "we were wrong, let's have a re-do." As Marc points out, it is a really awful precedent and one that will inevitably have ramifications that its early purveyors have not anticipated.
That said, I find it interesting that Schwartzenegger is trying preemptively to stop the possibility of redistricting in California, the most obvious example of a state where the state legislature could do precisely what I suggest, which is to affirm the power of Democrats at the expense of vulnerable Republicans. The outcome might be a good thing, but I do not trust the Gov's motives. Then again, I live in Texas and so have seen the effect of this redistricting up close where two long-term reps lost positions because their districts disappeared.
dc
I found it interesting (haven't followed his latest take), too. Of course, it is always a good idea not to generally trust a politician's motives - (or at least if you trust their motives, to be endlessly skeptical of their policy ideas), but being from the extreme moderate California wing of his party and having made a hulabaloo campaigning and governing against the partisan grain, perhaps he means it. The other factor is that despite railing against Austrian politics at the RNC, not being from America probably gives him a better perspective of what bad ideas we're wedded to out of nothing more than political tradition and inertia, even if it would be unwise for him to publicly state as much in this manner.
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