Gerrymandering: Constitutional, but Needs to Stop

(Apologies for the lack of a comprehensive election-reaction post, as yet anyway. Long story short, woohoo, let's reform the filibuster and ram a bunch of judges through the Senate, and I really hope something happens on climate-y issues in the next four years, but I'm not optimistic. And now for more miscellaneous posting, though most of it will probably still be election-focused for quite some time.)

It has long been my position that, while I heartily endorse Baker v. Carr and the series of cases that came out of it establishing the nationally-enforced principle of "one person, one vote" in legislative districting, and while I do believe racial gerrymanders, or theoretically gerrymanders on the basis of innate demographic factors other than race although it's tougher to see how that happens, can be unconstitutional in certain circumstances, I do not think that pure political gerrymandering can be struck down by the courts. Some of my reasons for this opinion include the idea that there's no constitutional right to live in a swing district, that no one individual's vote is likely to determine the outcome of an election even in a very competitive district so there's no categorical individual difference between swing and safe districts in that regard, and that, since partisanship and voting habits are not innate traits, unlike race, the notion that such-and-such a district will vote in such-and-such a way is a bit speculative. Voters, if they are severely displeased by having been gerrymander'd up, have the power to just vote for someone else. It's just not a denial of the equal protection of the laws, or of a republican form of government.

But that's just my constitutional opinion. On the policy merits, my god gerrymandering has got to go. I've just been reading a thing about how Jon Husted, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, wants his state to award its electoral votes by Congressional district instead of winner-take-all. A similar scheme was floated in Pennsylvania last year, and failed miserably. Maine and Nebraska already do this, though it rarely comes into play. (Obama's 2008 win of Omaha's single electoral vote, from the Second District of Nebraska, is the only time I can think of that it's mattered.) The problem here isn't just that implementing this system piecemeal in a handful of large states that tend to vote Democratic in Presidential elections would simply amount to a removal of some Democratic electors, though that's also true and very problematic. In Ohio, Obama (who won the state, no matter what Karl Rove might say) only won 4 or 5 of the state's 16 districts. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Republicans carried the remainder, of course, and so would have walked away with a solid majority of Ohio's electoral votes, despite losing the state. How is this possible, you ask? Well, because the Ohio state government, entirely under Republican control at the time of redistricting, passed a really aggressive gerrymander, packing every Democrat it could find into as few districts as possible and then trying to make the remaining Republican districts as evenly uncompetitive as possible. And it worked, and stuff like this is most of why John Boehner is still Speaker of the House. Democratic Congressional candidates got more votes than Republican ones this cycle, after all, but barely gained back any seats, because of really aggressive incumbent-protection redistricting by the largely-Republican state legislatures elected in 2010.

In our current system of gerrymanders, in other words, if a party happens to do anomalously well in the decade elections at the local level, it gets to bake in a Congressional advantage for the next ten years. Sure, Democrats do it too, and they're perfectly justified in doing it so long as Republicans are doing it in the states they control. Actually, there's nothing except an informal norm stopping a party that takes over a state government mid-decade from redistricting again in a way that's more friendly to their party's interests. But it's pretty damn apparent that there's nothing legitimate or desirable about this way of doing things. What we should do is have every state in the nation pass a state constitutional amendment setting up an independent redistricting committee. It happened in California, and it greatly increased the number of competitive seats. Or just tell a computer to come up with a map; I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Part of the problem, I guess, is that you will inevitably get a pattern of unilateral disarmament, so perhaps it should be structured as an interstate compact that will take effect when every other state has signed on as well. One way or another, this needs to be made to stop.

Oh, and yes, I consider this part of my tally of issues on which I don't think my policy position is required by the Constitution.