Election
day approaches and lists are being drawn of key districts to watch.
The
Herald-Leader focuses on 8 districts whose outcome could change who controls
the Kentucky House. 5 of the 8 have had their district lines redrawn.
Cn/2
politics focuses on 10..and 5 of these have had their lines redrawn.
In
both cases, the Democrats who control the House redrew lines for their
advantage. (Had the GOP been in control, based on past history in almost every
state, they would have redrawn lines to favor themselves.)
This
is NOT the way government should be run. Some states, 16 I think, have
been smart enough to shift the responsibility for redrawing district lines
after each census to a bi-partisan group (if not non-partisan.) In most cases
it’s an independent commission composed of specialists in population
studies, geography, political science—often from state universities—as well as
officials of both parties. Sometimes the legislatures can overturn those
lines..by a super majority..and recourse can be had to the courts.
Kentucky
needs to adopt such a system..and soon..long before the next census is held and
this gerrymandering begins again. The presents lines were delayed this cycle
because the first set of lines didn’t pass muster in the courts.
And
it’s not just the states. The “gridlock” of Washington can fairly be traced to
a GOP strategy (not that the Dems would have been different) of
gerrymandering Southern states (especially Texas where the top GOP official
responsible was convicted of violating the law and N.C. where new district
lines were only as wide as the interstate highway they followed, and key state
Florida, where the lines got redone just weeks before their most recent
election.)
Not
a way to run a railroad..or a nation that prides itself on democracy.
This is not democracy. Only such minor issues as war and taxes and
health care, and new highways, small stuff like that, hangs on those votes.
I
hope the presidents of UK and UL, which have faculties that study this
situation, may become “pro-active” (and pro-democracy) and suggest a way
out of Kentucky’s current mess..it’s long, long overdue.
I'm just sayin'...
The United States of America is not a Democracy, thank God we are a Constitutional Representative Federal Republic, there is no such thing as a 'non-partisan panel', some of these so-called non-partisan panels have been some of the greatest gerrymanderers - for example in California and in Arizona, the district in North Carolina you're talking about was only created due to the unconstitutional Voting Rights Act mandating federal oversight of districts in the South, mandating black and hispanic majority districts, rather than local region districts.
ReplyDeleteOther 'non-partisan', or 'bi-partisan' redistricting efforts are just as wrong, taking the idea that it is their goal to create 'fair-fight', or moderate districts which favor neither party, the political leaning of the districts in question should have no import on how they are drawn, these Representatives are meant to represent the needs of a region, whether that area has issues for soybean farming, irrigation, immigration, alligator fishing, university education, etc. That area is meant to be represented, not these racist federal democrat-mandated groups, Lyndon Johnson knew that blacks supported democrats by 90%+ margins, therefore the Voting Rights Act was designed to carve, in effect, at-large extremely safe, extremely liberal seats from states and areas where he could not expect any seats to be so.
Yours is a popular view, but it is not an accurate view, liberals are packed into very small left-wing districts because they live in small, urban, left-wing areas, geography is the modern liberals enemy in house districts
And I'm just sayin'