Show Notes
With important mid-term elections coming in November, “the latest rage in politics is cracking and packing,” says Peter Schweizer.
“Gerrymandering is in the news right now,” says co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down. “Cracking is when you spread out your opposition’s voters into different districts. Packing is the reverse of that, when you pack your opponent’s voters into a single district.”
Mid-decade congressional redistricting has dominated congressional politics in the past year as first, Texas, then California made opposing moves to squeeze additional seats for their dominant political parties. Redistricting efforts have happened in nine states, Florida being the latest. In Virginia, a statewide referendum spurred by the Democrats to allow the state’s legislature to ignore its own constitution was narrowly passed last month by voters but overturned a short time later by the state’s supreme court on procedural grounds.
I addition, a recent Supreme Court ruling determined that a Louisiana congressional district was unconstitutional because it was drawn on racial lines, not on geographical or partisan lines. Other states such as Georgia and Alabama are now racing to redraw their own districts, citing compliance with the High Court’s decision as their reason.
“Gerrymandering” is nothing new, of course. The term dates back to 1812, when a signer of the Constitution named Elbridge Gerry as governor of Massachusetts drew one congressional district’s lines so that looked like a curling salamander, thus the term. American politicians have been “cracking and packing” ever since.
“This has been going on for centuries,” Schweizer points out. He suspects that the net result of all these mid-decade redistricting moves will help the Republicans. He lists several examples from history when similar efforts happened. “Like it or not, this is something that has been quite common in the past.”
“It is not just done every 10 years when there’s a Census, which is what the media wants you to believe,” Schweizer says. “California did it in the 1980s and in the 2010s. Illinois is famous for having their districts drawn in a sprawling way.”
The criticism now has centered on congressional districts that were drawn specifically to have majority-black electorates, but when Tennessee redrew its map this year after the Court’s decision, it eliminated the “one majority-black district in Memphis, ironically, that is represented by a non-black man [Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN)], whom they won’t even allow in the Congressional Black Caucus,” says Eggers. He later notes that one “casualty” of Utah’s redistricting is that black Republican Rep. Burgess Owens is retiring after his district was redrawn to be more Democrat-leaning.
“There are only four members of Congress who are Republicans who happened to be African American,” he says.
California’s delegation is currently split with 43 Democrats and just 9 Republican. There are seven states, — Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Rhode Island — that have zero Republican seats. “If you add up all the registered Republicans in those states, that’s 2 million people in seven states who have zero voices.”
“Both sides try to say it’s the other guy’s fault,” Schweizer agrees. “One of the arguments to solving this problem is, to just set up a nonpartisan commission within the state to draw the districts. In California, they actually passed a proposition that said we’re going to have this nonpartisan commission, of course, picked by partisan politicians, to draw these districts… Then when these panels don’t do what the political masters want them to do, they change the game, which is what happened in California and in New York. “
In Louisiana, Democrats believed that because black people make up a third of Louisiana’s total population, they should have two majority-minority districts among the state’s six districts. The Supreme Court disagreed.
“And by the way, Louisiana and other states didn’t do that because there are a bunch of Klan members in these states who want to keep blacks in certain districts,” Schweizer says. “No, it’s the opposite. It was actually black politicians who wanted safe seats.”
“It should be drawn based on the political contours. It should have nothing to do with race. I think it’s the right decision. But it’s ironic to me that it’s Democrats who are objecting to this change,” Schweizer says of the Court’s decision.
“I heard a great interview with the Louisiana Attorney General,” Eggers says. “She said, ‘When you’re in law school, you’re always taught that the Constitution trumps the statute, but they’ve allowed the statutes to beat the Constitution.’”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-CA) gave an interview to Jen Psaki and even he noted there are 56 members of the Congressional Black Caucus in the house, yet only 11 of them represent majority black districts. “Which means 45 of them represent non-majority black districts. So, clearly, they are still viable,” he says. “This fiction that’s been around that white Americans will not vote for African Americans is not true. ”
Schweizer’s view on gerrymandering is that it is a historical reality and bound to happen. The trick is for voters within each state to hold their politicians accountable for blatant power grabs such as what the Democrats in Virginia just tried to do.
“I don’t see any sort of master plan where you have an allegedly nonpartisan person in these very partisan times who is going to draw this up and everybody’s going to say, ‘Yeah, gee, we now see it…’ That is just not going to happen,” he says. “I think we’re stuck with the current system. We just need to hold our leaders to account when they engage in egregious examples of gerrymandering.”
“If people don’t like what they tried to do in Virginia, they may vote for a different governor,” he says.
