In the 2018 Congressional elections blue wave washed over the US House of Representatives. The Democrats gained 41 seats in the House while taking over control of the chamber from the Republicans. However, Democratic candidates won 8.1% of the votes cast in 2018 House elections and if the number of seats they won were proportional to the vote count, Democrats would have won an additional 18 seats. Today a 5 to 4 ruling of the US Supreme Court along ideological lines ensured that this kind inequity can continue indefinitely.
Here are a couple of the examples of how seats in the House that should have gone to Democrats went to Republicans instead: In North Carolina Democrats got 50% of the votes cast in US House of Representatives elections statewide but they won only 3 of the 13 NC House seats. In Pennsylvania Democrats got 55% of the House votes statewide, but they won only 9 of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats. What is the cause of this lack of proportionality – the answering is “partisan gerrymandering”.
First a little background info. Every 10 years the government takes a nationwide census (the next one is in 2020). When the results of the census are in, the 435 House seats are reapportioned among the states based on their revised population totals. Some states gain House seats and some states end up with fewer meaning the House districts in many states have to be redrawn. Unless otherwise directed by state law it is the state legislators who have the responsibility of drawing up the boundaries the new House districts in their states.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, “gerrymandering, it is a fairly easy concept to understand. An example of gerrymandering is unfair drawing of a state’s US House district boundaries by party in control of the state legislature. What they do is they draw up the boundaries of the state’s House districts in a manner that stuffs as many of the opposing parties voters into as few House districts as possible. (In NC the majority of Democrats live in just three House districts.) They then draw the boundaries of the remaining districts so that their party has a comfortable majority of their voters in each of them. (In NC Republicans hold a comfortable advantage of the voters in 10 of the state’s 13 House districts even though approximately half North Carolina voters favored Democrats in the 2018 House races.)
However, I don’t want to give you the impression that gerrymandering occurs only when drawing the boundaries of the districts used to elect a state’s members of the US House of Representatives. State legislatures often draw up the boundaries of the districts used to elect members of the two chambers of the state legislatures. In other words the party in power in a state’s legislature has the ability to gerrymander their own legislative districts in order to try to keep their party in power indefinitely even if their members do not continue to collectively get the majority of the votes cast in future elections. That also greatly increases the probability that the party in power will still be in power after the next census so they will also get to gerrymander the state’s US House of Representative districts.
The following sections in italics describes how gerrymandering actually works it is optional reading; you can skip it if you would like:
The following is a very simple graphic example how a simple geographical area can be gerrymandered.
The area on the left is the geographical area which is to be divided into 5 districts. An equal number of voters live in each of the fifty squares on the map and only green party or only yellow party voters live in each of the fifty squares as indicated by the square’s colors. (Again this is a simplification for illustration purposes.) In any case the green party has two fifths of the voters and the yellow party has three fifths of the voters in the geographical area, perhaps it is a state. The images at the bottom right represents a fair way of dividing up the geographical area into five districts. Under normal conditions the yellow party would have the advantage in three districts and the green party the advantage in two districts.
The top middle image is an example of how the yellow party might draw up the district lines in gerrymandering manner if it were in control of the legislature. With this arrangement It would have the electoral advantage in each of the five districts though it has only 3/5 of the voters. The yellow party might also want to draw the districts lines as shown in the middle image at the bottom. That way it can absolutely ensure that it will win three of the five districts in each election and stay in control. If the green party controls the legislature when the redistricting occurs it might gerrymander the districts as shown in the top right illustration. Note how many of the squares with yellow party voters have been pushed into two districts giving the green party a comfortable advantage in the other three districts even though it has only 2/5 of the voters.
Gerrymandering is almost as old as our country. One of the first known cases of gerrymandering occurred in 1812 when the Massachusetts legislature drew up a weirdly shaped election district to provide an advantage for candidates of the Democratic-Republican Party headed by the Governor Elbridge Gerry over their opponents in the Federalist Party. The illustration at the top of this article is a cartoon featuring a map that legislative district depicted as a monster. Federalist leaning newspapers at the time noted that the district also looked like a salamander and created the word, “gerrymander”, a combination of the Governor’s name and the name of that animal.
The following are the 10 most gerrymandered states in the nation as measured by the results of the 2018 US House of Representative elections. These ten states are listed showing the discrepancy in each state between the percentages of votes for each party statewide and the number of House Representatives elected for each party (Note that only one of these states – Maryland – is gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats:
Pennsylvania
Votes – 45% Republicans, 55% Democrats
House districts – 13 Republicans, 5 Democrats (72% Republicans)
North Carolina
Votes – 50% Republicans, 50% Democrats
House districts – 10 Republicans, 3 Democrats (77% Republicans)
Ohio
Votes – 53% Republicans, 47% Democrats
House districts – 12 Republicans, 4 Democrats (75% Republicans)
Texas
Votes – 52% Republicans, 48% Democrats
House districts – 23 Republicans, 13 Democrats (63% Republicans)
Maryland
Votes 33% Republicans, 67% Democrats
House districts – 1 Republicans, 7 Democrats (85% Democrats)
Louisiana
Votes – 67% Republicans, 33% Democrats
House districts – 5 Republican, 1 Democrats (83% Republicans)
Arkansas
Votes – 64% Republicans, 36% Democrats
House districts – 4 Republicans, 0 Democrats (100% Republicans)
West Virginia
Votes – 67% Republicans, 33% Democrats
House districts – 3 Republicans, 0 Democrats
Kentucky
Votes – 67% Republicans, 33% Democrats
House districts – 3 Republicans, 0 Democrats (100% Republicans
Utah
Votes – 83% Republicans, 17% Democrats
House districts – 6 Republican, 0 Democratic
The Supreme Court reviewed two gerrymandering cases, one involving North Carolina and the other Maryland. I don’t think that the it is any accident that the North Carolina case involved gerrymandering by Republicans while the Maryland case involved gerrymandering by Democrats. In the past the Supreme Court has made it clear that it is not allowable to gerrymander based on the race of the voters involved and it is not acceptable try to gain political advantage by stuffing more voters in some districts than others. However, the court has never until now issued a definitive ruling on partisan gerrymandering in large part because it found it difficult to determine with the necessary certainty that the intent behind the drawing of voting district lines was to gain political advantage. (I would argue that partisan gerrymandering is like pornography, “you know it when you see it”.)
In the North Carolina and Maryland cases the Supreme Court punted, though it isn’t clear to whom, but it was clear that the punt clearly favored the Republicans who have made gerrymandering into both a science and an art form. In the court’s majority opinion Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that though partisan gerrymandering is damaging our democracy, none of the federal courts had any business attempting to address such cases because they were basically political issues. “We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” and that asking the courts to block gerrymandered districts effectively sought “an unprecedented expansion of judicial power.”
In rebuttal Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the minority opinion which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor: “The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for legislative reform are slight,”
Isn’t it convenient it that five Justices appointed by Republican presidents all refused to stop the Republicans from unfairly stacking the US House of Representatives and the state legislators with their candidates? Since from now on they will know that no federal court will ever again hear a case involving partisan gerrymandering, expect the Republican dominated state legislatures to be even more blatant in their abuse of this fraudulent tactic.
It is also interesting that Roberts mentioned in the majority opinion that there were other avenues for addressing the problem noting that some states have created non-partisan redistricting commissions to take over the work of reworking election district boundaries from the state legislators. What is interesting about that is when he was involved in hearing a case where state legislators challenged the legitimacy of such a commission which had been created by a state ballot initiative, Roberts sided with the legislators against the legitimacy of the commission. It calls into question how he would cast the deciding if and when another such a case comes up before the Supreme Court.
This is yet another obstacle thrown in our path as the Republican desperately try to hang on to political power in the face of relentless demographics upheavals which threaten to eventually make them the permanent minority party. This too we will overcome along with all of the other obstacles they have and will use to stop or at least slow our progress, but only if we are not stupid enough to start fighting among ourselves again.
Cajun 6/28/2019