A lot of hand-wringing and moanin’ and groanin’ have been recorded in recent weeks over the nation’s highly polarized political climate. Place some of the blame for our unusually warm politics to politics as usual.
During the debt-ceiling fight, political experts pinpointed gerrymandering of congressional districts as one source contributing to the nasty tone of the controversy. Gerrymandering, the term for drawing outrageously shaped congressional districts to benefit one political party, helped elect ideologically driven candidates. While the finger was pointed at the Tea Party members in the House of Representatives, the same case could be made about far left-wing Democratic members, including their leader, Nancy Pelosi from an ultra-liberal San Francisco.
Well, get ready for more of this.
After the 2010 census, legislatures across the land are redrawing electoral boundaries. And mapmaking mischief, a k a gerrymandering, is running full throttle in some places, such as Illinois.
Firmly in control of the General Assembly and the governor’s office in Springfield, Democrats produced a map designed to override the will of voters and wipe out the results of the 2010 congressional elections. Last year the voters elected 11 Republicans and eight Democrats to Congress. The redistricting seems sure to reverse that next year, resulting in six Republican and 12 Democratic members of Congress. (Illinois lost one seat in the census.)
Democrats did this via the egregious drawing of maps typical of gerrymandering. Traditionally GOP DuPage County was divided into six districts. Two incumbent GOP congressmen found themselves drawn into one district. Hinsdale, on the western edge of Cook County, is in the same district as Wrigley Field, practically a baseball throw from Lake Michigan. That was one of three cases where Republican members suddenly found themselves in strong Democratic districts. GOP Rep. Judy Biggert of Hinsdale lost 98 percent of her constituents.
Democrats aren’t the only ones playing this game. In North Carolina, the GOP is giving the shaft to Democratic members of Congress.
No matter who is guilty, gerrymandering is an affront to democracy — the politicians are picking their voters. One side effect is to elect ideologically driven candidates. Gerrymandering is not the only reason. The Tea Party was propelled to power by outrage over the spending binge and big government policies of a liberal president and a Congress run by left-wing ideologues. Still, gerrymandering affects the tenor of politics.
The Committee for a Fair and Balanced Map, an independent group led by some prominent Illinois Republicans, joined GOP members of Congress and several Hispanic voters in a court challenge to the Democratic-passed map.
Courts understandably shy away from partisan political fights. That’s why a key allegation in the lawsuit is that the map denies Latinos the chance to elect a second congressman. The committee drew its own map that meets the good-government standards of compact districts that respect community boundaries. It preserved one guaranteed Hispanic seat and drew a district with a fast-growing Latino population that soon could elect another.
It says something about today’s political environment that this lawsuit’s best chance seems to rely on allegation of a disenfranchisement of voters based on their ethnicity rather than the Democrats’ obvious intention — to disenfranchise voters based on how they think.
This legal challenge lost some of is partisan tinge this week when the League of Women Voters, a respected nonpartisan organization, filed its own lawsuit against the outrageous map. In one sentence, League President Jan Dorner summed up what’s wrong with the Democrats’ offensive anti-democratic map: “We want an election where the results are not apparent before the campaign begins.”