Occam's Razor

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on whether Wisconsin’s state assembly map constitutes an illegal partisan gerrymander. The court has never struck down a voting district map based solely on its political boundaries, so it’s unwise for those who would like to see fairer voting districts to get their expectations up.

I’m not enough of a lawyer (not being one at all) to understand the legal issues, other than the constitution specifically delegates voting criteria to the states. The Voting Rights Act requires that certain criteria (like race-based criteria) cannot be used in drawing maps. This hasn’t kept states from doing this anyhow. In most cases courts strike down these maps after an election where they are used to partisan advantage. New districts are drawn that are generally still illegal, so the cycle seems to continue forever and never really gets settled. At least that’s been the case since the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that certain predominantly southern states no longer need to have their voting maps cleared in advance.

State assembly maps are where the real power is, because generally they draw the political boundaries for both state and federal voting districts. Republicans used this to great effect after the 2010 election when they won Congress and state houses. Voting districts were required to be redrawn based on the 2010 census so Republicans used it to lock in their power at least through 2020. Quite frankly, this has a lot to do with the mess we are in at the moment. These highly partisan voting maps as well as state voting restrictions that don’t pass the smell test have given Republicans enormous political clout that far overstates their power if voting districts were created fairly and impartially.

Pretty much everyone agrees that our politics are a huge mess. This is a direct result of extreme gerrymandering. I sure hope the court finds political gerrymandering illegal, but most likely they will not. I hope this not just because I necessarily am pining for more Democrats in office. I say this because to end our political mess we need lots of moderates in office. I can’t see any way to bring moderates back into politics unless we end political gerrymandering.

Democrats may be in the minority in Congress, but it’s becoming even harder to find any moderates left in Congress. Moderates of both parties used to form the political center. Their presence allowed government to function because they facilitated political compromise. These days significant change is only possible if one party controls both Congress and the White House. Usually when that happens you get laws that only appeal to the rabid wings of the party. Trumpcare is liked by only 16% of Americans, with even only 34% of Republicans liking it, but that doesn’t mean that Congress won’t pass it anyhow.

If it happens it will be a law of immense cruelty. Make no mistake: the Senate’s current version of the bill has nothing to do with improving health care. That’s merely a smokescreen. It has two principle purposes. The first is to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Republicans see it as restoring tax rates for the wealthy to what they were before the Affordable Care Act. The second is to end Medicaid as an open-ended entitlement program. For more than fifty years it has set a floor that no citizen could sink beneath. By limiting federal contributions, it encourages states to race toward the bottom: limiting enrollment and cutting benefits. In effect, the poor will simply get poorer, making the wealth gap even worse than it is now. The effect is pretty obvious: lots of people are going to die prematurely and painfully. It’s an outcome that only the Marquis de Sade and today’s Republicans can love.

All this is from a supposedly “pro-life” party. It’s obviously quite the opposite. I’ve discussed these gaping inconsistencies in many other posts, so I won’t revisit them here. What I will note is that whether it is Republicans who want to kill off their poor constituents because they don’t believe the rich should help subsidize their health, or whether it’s far left partisan Democrats who won’t accept anything less than single-payer health insurance, ideally at government-run hospitals and healthcare centers like the Veterans Administration, these are solutions favored by a fringe. Ask your typical man or woman in the street if they favor either of these approaches and you are likely to get a resounding “No!”

But you don’t see many of these people in Congress because gerrymandering conspires to leave them out. That’s the real crime of gerrymandering: trying to force the government to be run by the extreme partisans when it needs the consent of the governed, which includes a lot of moderates. Gerrymandering extends political dysfunction, empowers people that hate their own government, fosters conflict and may pave the way toward a new civil war.

All of this is preventable if government can become of, by and for the people again. With moderates forming about 35% of the population, but likely represented by no more than 10% of legislators their interests are simply not getting considered. This is political disenfranchisement on a massive scale. Blacks may be disproportionately under represented, but at least these highly-partisan voting maps gives them some diluted representation. Moderates though have little to no representation. Unless the Supreme Court steps up and declares political gerrymandering unconstitutional or (much more unlikely) Congress sees the light and acts against their own partisan interests to enact such a law, it’s not hard to predict that our government will become more detached from its citizens, ultimately representing mostly a highly partisan few. That’s a recipe for national disorder that only the Kremlin would approve because it is simply not democratic. It’s not even republican.

So the Supreme Court could become the savior of our democracy if they find the legal standing or discipline to do so in their upcoming decision. If there was ever a reason for Americans to pray, praying the Supreme Court sees the light on this seems a priority for religious Americans of all types.