Goose, Gander, and Gerrymanders: Hypocrisy in Redistricting

In the Greener household, my now 98 year-old mother would often say “what is good for the goose is good for the gander.”  This old expression simply meant that if something you said or did was good for you, it should be good for me when I do it.  When it comes to Congressional redistricting, one wonders if Democrats believe the old expression is true.  To hear their feigned outrage about what Republicans are doing in Texas, you would think new ground was being broken.  Apparently, they now want us to believe Congressional Districts should be as geographically compact as possible.  They sound like Claude Raines in Casablanca.  They are “shocked, shocked to find there is gambling going on here.”  Looking at the actual record on the subject, one is tempted to laugh out loud.

The father of the modern gerrymander—the art of drawing legislative lines to maximize political benefit for one party—is the late Democratic Congressman Phil Burton.  After drawing the lines to assure his brother John had a safe district, he said,“It’s gorgeous…it curls in and out like a snake,” and “it’s my contribution to modern art.”  This was back in the 1980s!

To satisfy legal requirements, there are three items involved (one with an appendix).  First, there is the Supreme Court decision in Baker versus Carr, which held that districts had to have as little population deviation between the districts as possible.  This has become known as “one man, one vote.”

Second is the community of interest.  This came about during the Civil Rights battles of the 1960’s.  It is how the Justice Department had to approve the lines in the deep south to assure African Americans were given appropriate representation.  This is the requirement that has been modified.  The Court decision in the case involving African American Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA) was essentially that you had to have enough African Americans in a given district to virtually assure the election of an African American, but not so many packed into one district it improperly impacted other districts.  This is all tricky business.

The third, and least important, requirement is geographic compactness.  That this is the least important is witnessed by what Congressional Districts look like on any map.  At one point, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) had a district stretching from just outside Atlanta to Augusta, joined together by Interstate 20.  In other words, the only way to actually sit in her district would have been to put a chair on an Interstate highway.

What about today?  No less a Democrat than Julian Epstein, the former staff director of the House Judiciary Committee under famous Democratic partisan Barney Frank, observed that in states such as Illinois, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey, Democrats “have effectively gerrymandered Republicans out of existence.”  He added that “I don’t think they (Democrats) have the moral authority, and there is a lot of pearl-clutching going.”

In Illinois, Republicans received 46.97 percent of the votes in Congressional races.  In return, they won three of the 17 districts, or 17.6 percent of the seats.  The Land of Lincoln is far from alone.  In New Jersey, Republicans received 45.30 percent of the vote.  That translated into winning three of 12 districts, or 25 percent.  In California, Republicans won 39.23 percent of the vote, resulting in winning nine of 52 district, or 17.30 percent of the seats. For New York, it is 45.52 percent of the vote, which translated into winning seven of 26 seats, which is 26.92 percent of the seats.  In Massachusetts, Democrats do not mess around.  There are zero Republicans.  The lines drawn to create these outcomes would make John Burton proud.

None of this has caused Democrats to even blush.  Instead, they rise up in righteous indignation when what they have been doing for decades is attempted by Republicans.  In a world where the corporate media did more than parrot Democratic talking points, they would be called out for their hypocrisy.  Instead, you might think something new and awful is taking place.

Remember this: either it’s okay to maximize your political strength, or the premium should be put upon being as fair as possible.  It should not be, it is okay for you to be as political as possible, but a sin against mankind for me to do it.  After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.  What do you think?