A cause that unites lawmakers

David Broder reported in a Washington Post column about Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress pressuring the Federal Election Commission. The lawmakers convinced the FEC to change its ruling and allow them to raise unlimited amounts of money to fight California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to give redistricting authority to a panel of retired judges.
In California, as in Kansas, lawmakers basically draft their own district boundaries. And the primary goal is protecting incumbents, not being fair or making any geographic sense — which is how we get districts that look like they were drawn on an Etch A Sketch.
As Broder noted: “If there is one cause that motivates the politicians more than the pursuit of pork, it is the protection of their own custom-made districts, shaped by computers and backroom negotiations to spare them the inconvenience of competition on Election Day.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

7 Comments

  1. Joe Williams
    Posted September 2, 2005 at 6:16 am | Permalink

    Gerrymandering! I think it is a good idea to have a panel of judges to do the redistricting.

  2. dan newland
    Posted September 2, 2005 at 7:56 am | Permalink

    gee! ya think ?

  3. Anon
    Posted September 2, 2005 at 8:26 am | Permalink

    But will we then have “activist judges” making the districts. That will be the next complaint.

  4. brown
    Posted September 2, 2005 at 1:11 pm | Permalink

    If the politicians don’t like it, then it must be fair. Districts should be a uniform shape. This would help eliminate confusion on election day.

  5. Jed
    Posted September 2, 2005 at 3:23 pm | Permalink

    Because our honorable legislators want to keep their phony-baloney jobs, just like the rest of us, we can’t trust them, or any other elected official to redistrict fairly. Why not design a computer program to draw boundaries on a strictly numerical basis, and let the chads fall where they may? Let the districts be random and redrawn at each census. It has the advantage of occasionally being fair by accident, as opposed to our current system which is never fair.

  6. Joe Williams
    Posted September 3, 2005 at 6:35 pm | Permalink

    Jed! If that were to happen, there would be no Democrat in office.

  7. brown
    Posted September 6, 2005 at 10:17 pm | Permalink

    Joe,If they used Jed’s idea, which I think is a good one, I don’t think it would be Democrats who would bear the brunt of this. I think it would be incumbents.