Our Shutdown-Congress Does Agree on One Thing: Gerrymandering
As the government shutdown approaches its third week and a showdown over the debt ceiling approaches, many people within the US and around the world are asking 鈥淲hy can鈥檛 these clowns just work together?鈥
However, the problem is not that Congress can鈥檛 work together. The problem is that the one thing they can work together on is legislative redistricting.
Legislative redistricting is the process of redrawing the boundaries of legislative districts to account for changes in population. As populations shift, the boundaries of our districts have to be redrawn to make sure each district has roughly the same number of people.
However, in many cases the goal has become not only to maintain the balance of populations, but to change the balance of political loyalties within the district.
If a legislator can re-draw a mostly Democratic district such that it cuts out the neighborhoods where Republicans have a presence, her district goes from mostly Democrat to entirely Democrat.
Perhaps even better, if two legislators can swap a Democratic neighborhood in a Republican district, for a Republican neighborhood in an adjacent Democratic district, they鈥檝e just ensured that they鈥檒l both get re-elected in the next term.
According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight鈥檚 Nate Silver, in the last election cycle there were only 35 congressional districts that were genuinely competitive between parties.
That means that in roughly 92 percent of our legislative elections, the representatives of the people were effectively chosen by whichever party had a lock on that district. Far from being elected by the people, these legislators were elected by a small fraction of ideologically committed party activists.
When campaigning in one of these safe districts, a candidate need not worry about opposition from someone of a different political stripe. Instead, she just has to be a better Republican or Democrat than her primary opponent. And given that only the most ideologically committed tend to vote in primary elections, this rewards those with the most extreme views and it makes legislators beholden to party extremists.
Far from the debate of opposing perspectives and exchange of ideas that our system is supposed to encourage, we get a rush to the poles to prove ideological purity and party loyalty.
If you鈥檙e concerned about the government shutdown and a much more dangerous national debt default; if you worry about the ridiculous circus that has taken over the halls of Congress; if you want to see an end to gridlock, the solution is not to 鈥渢hrow the bums out鈥 but rather to force them to change their corrosive redistricting practices.
We give these people the keys to power so that they can act in our best interest, and instead they use that power to change the locks.
Of course, the sources of our political dysfunction are deeper than redistricting, and it will take a very long time to get us back on track. However, redistricting reform is a critical step in the right direction, and a step we can take today.
About the author: Christiaan Mitchell is a third-year student at the William S. Richardson School of Law.
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