The Constitution Today: Redistricting
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-22/constitution-today-redistricting
Four states--Virginia, New Jersey, Louisiana and Mississippi – have begun redistricting. It’s a grueling process that’s often politically charged. And the U.S. Constitution doesn’t provide many guidelines. The framers laid out how the number of representatives should be chosen, but left it up to the states to decide how to elect them. In some cases, that's created vastly unequal and unfair districts, and given rise to cases of Gerrymandering. As part of our "The Constitution Today" series, we examine what the document says about drawing congressional and legislative districts and how court decisions have further shaped those guidelines.
Guests
Sean O'Brien
executive director, Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier
Thomas Mann
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
Nate Persily
The Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science at Columbia Law School. Founder of drawcongress.org
Comments
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Let the military figure out their own logistics, and risks. The talking heads and Baby Boy McCain, and Cuccinellie Head only shake the rattle to raise funds for their charming private policy. We are not all in it together. And they are only in it for their fund raising friends and direct mailers and ad makers. Let the military and state department think and consult with people who are more connected. Don't consult the bobble heads of the american commercial press.
What about a more mathematical process. For example, we could weight each congressman's vote in congress by the number of votes they received in the election across a state.
Since congressman seem to be representing their party much more than their district, at least this would give everyone a reason to vote, even for candidates that would lose in their currently district.
At the moment, if you are not in the majority in your district, you feel like casting your vote is a futile exercise, and that your congressman is not representing you in congress.
Of course this would present some issues about exactly which person is chosen, so one would be voting for a party, but how much worse can that be than the current system?
And maybe we could discourage the use of the phrase "the American people want" - I think that is getting offensive. Some people want this, others want that. At best, a group may want something, but even then, a group or individual will not have a single want, but desires which balance against other desires.
In Ohio, my State Representative Terrence Blair stated categorically when he was running for office that he would work to end gerrymandering. While he made an (perhaps cynical & politically expedient) attempt at the end of the first session (in cooperation with then Sen Husted), since the Republican have established an Oligarchy here, they seem to have lost interest.
Would you talk about generic redistricting laws that could be referenced or quickly adopted when the opportunity appears?
Personally, I'd be happy if they were just required to publish the computer algorithms (and all parameters) used to establish the new districts.
Additionally, I suspect that being required to respect neighborhood petitions (to be considered a single entity that would be wholly included within any political district) would also make it more difficult to achieve political objectives.
Tom Delay was convicted and may be in prison for his
"energetic" efforts to elect and redistrict for conservative candidates.
The caller's claim that all the founders were slave owners and masons and pulled one over on us is not true. A few were masons, but not all. Many of the southerners were slave owners, but not the northerners. John Adams owned no slaves. Had employees on his farm and opposed slavery.
Wow
The guests seem to justify gerrymandering and are also maintaining that the result is NOT partisan districts.
Sure: the incumbents are protected and
they (the guests) get (re)employed to draw districts.
I remember in school learning that gerrymandering was made illegal also.
It seems that history is being rewritten.
It just seems wrong no matter who is doing it.
does anyone read these comments?
the idea of eliminating labels for the partys is interesting.
Is, or has there been, any basis for basing redistricting on ecological regions (such as watersheds or sub-watersheds) as a way to emphasize the common interests that (can/should) unite communities geogrphically?
Gerrymandering could be much reduced by simply imposing a ratio of the length around the district to the area within the district.
I like the idea of the non-partisan redistricting, rather than having the foxes guard the hen house. In Colorado, we are getting ready for a knock-down drag out fight over this as we have a Republican House and Democratic Senate and Governor. The experiment of using "regular" people in California is intriguing.
The subject of political parties came up several times during the hour. I did hear the reason for this mentioned briefly: The Constitutional system in the United State only allows for Single-Member Districts. This means every seat in the House of Representatives is winner take all. That's how we ended up with just 2 political parties, rather than several or one--the parties will always hover around 50% of the population due to the way seats are selected.
It sounded like, according to your guests, that this was a choice made by the states, and that they could have used other ways to select members. Proportional representation would result in a much different political environment.
I'm afraid I disagree with Ms. Rehm's statement that most Americans think hard about issues and candidates. It may be more true in some cities, states or regions than mine, but in my experience many people are painfully ignorant of issues, facts and backgrounds of candidates, both on a local and national scale. If Ms. Rehm were correct, I don't think G.W. Bush could have ever been elected. His academic background was mediocre at best, his business background was unimpressive, his personal history was tainted and his National Guard service was not very honorable. Not to mention his obvious lack of fluency in English. Or, he may have been elected because Americans want an "average Joe" to be the leader of the free world. A sad situation in either case.
Where can I find a link to the site that allows me to do local redistricting? I was able to get - drawcongres.org- but a guest spoke of another site.
Two points: 1) The constitution does not require districts to be geography-based at all. They can assign your representative according to your birthdate.
2) However, the advantage of doing it by geography is that you can spread representatives' offices across the state to minimize constituents' travel time. The boundaries should be then set according to travel time, similar to the time travel map programs used to redraw school boundaries to minimize bus travel time and fuel use. This will result in relatively simple shapes.
The need to adjust from these simple shapes to accommodate minorities or communities of interest is overrated because, without foresight of the outcome of the future elections, it is unclear whether the boundaries are in "need" of uncracking or unpacking.
After the election, you can always look back and find examples where a minority community of interest would have done better if a particular set of districts were un cracked or unpacked, but then they may have benefitted from compact districts in other areas of the state.
Perhaps there's a good reason for the shape of Arizona District 2 but it smells of gerrymandering to me.
Great show.
This issue is very simple.
Will get to the redistricting sophistry after
this introductory context.
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ALL DECEPTION to the CONTRARY NOTWITHSTANDING
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1776 was the Birth of NWO PART I
The International NEW WORLD SLAVE TRADE.
1776 was also the centennial of SABBATAI ZEVI's
death and the Birth of Weishaupt's Illuminati.
ISRAEL NATIONAL RADIO's discussion
of SABBATAI ZEVI http://GOO.GL/b8c6k
LETS USE REAL ROBOTS for NWO PART II, shall we ?
Now back to REDISTRICTING... in next message...
continued from previous comment...
Inseparable Part of the FAIL SAFE VOTING SYSTEM
http://goo.gl/mq3zh
GERRYMANDERING PREVENTION MECHANISM:
1. This is a very simple issue that has been obfuscated
to make it easy for those who have robotized the
public via fine P$AULINE rhetoric...
2. The simple solution is to have an equal number of voters
per district with no concern for party affiliation whatsoever.
PERIOD. THIS IS THE KEY
3. State's total population is divided by number of districts to
give number of voters per district.
4. The districts would be COMPLETELY AGNOSTIC, census data
would NOT include anything but a head count, just as prescribed
in any just Constitution.
5. The shape of the districts would be rectangular, no weird shapes.
Voters do not get to pick their district and neither do the politicians
get to pick their voters. This is the only way fairness can be assured.
6. Rectangles are sized mathematically to create equal number of voters
per district based purely on geometry starting in the upperleft hand
corner of the map one row at a time until each district is selected.
7. Rectangles are centered on center of gravity of population centers
based on well known ancient engineering center of gravity spatial
geometric principals.
8. In big cities, same process is fractally repeated, again agnostically on
purely geometrical population density basis.
9. Then each representative is assigned the district whose center of
gravity is closest to the representative's home address.
10. This process is repeated each election cycle.
11. All other explanations are horse trading moonshine.
Send questions to: sysop@TeamInfinity.com
ONLY FAIL-SAFE-VOTING SYSTEM POSSIBLE:
http://goo.gl/mq3zh
hate to say it, dan, but I'm pretty sure they don't use ANY algorithms or parameters to draw these things. I think they just grab a map and a pencil and go through it saying "Hmm, I think I want this bit of neighborhood, and this one over here looks helpful" Actually using an algorithm might go a long way.
One suggestion I've heard would be to require minimum congruency between state and national districts. State senators would then have it in their interest to draw districts benefiting themselves, and as a consequence national districts would be more mixed.
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