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Redistricting for Dummies: How to End the Gerrymander

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English: Gerrymander diagram for four sample d...
English: Gerrymander diagram for four sample districts. Created in Adobe Illustrator by Jeremy Kemp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Every ten years, based on the latest census data, the states receive new apportionments of seats in the US House of Representatives. The state legislatures begin mapping out revised districts to accommodate changes in population, population distribution, and increases or decreases in the number of seats.

And five years later, some state legislatures (at the moment, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia top the list) are still fighting over how to divide the spoils. Districts are re-drawn to protect powerful incumbents, give each major party at least token representation, and preserve the political power of labor lobbies, racial and ethnic communities, and other special interests. Each redistricting scheme ends up in court with multiple trips back to the drawing board.

This process is called “gerrymandering,” after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 signed a state senate redistricting map in which one district resembled a salamander.

It’s an ugly process. Everybody claims to hate it. But nobody seems interested in ending it, though it would be simple to do so.

Judge Robert Bork, later a failed nominee to the US Supreme Court, was once tasked with submitting a redistricting plan. He suggested starting in one corner of the state and drawing roughly square districts by population, without regard to special interest factors. His suggestion wasn’t accepted. But it would be easy to implement. Just plug the map and census data into a computer program and voila — uniform districts, fairly drawn.

Even better, why not transition to “at-large” elections for all US Representatives?

The district concept was implemented before the invention of the telegraph, at a time when most Americans got their news from a local paper and never strayed more than 50 miles from their birthplaces. Local elections made sense then. Today we cross the continent in hours and read worldwide news seconds after it happens (or watch it AS it happens).

Why not just have a statewide election for (for example) five seats, in which the five top vote-getters are elected? This would not eliminate sectional interests, pork barrel earmarks and other maladies of supposedly representative government entirely, but it would make members of Congress more accountable to large, mixed constituencies and less beholden to the insular coalitions controlling gerrymandered districts.

Switching to “at-large” elections might also mitigate the power of the two-party “duopoly” in favor of more proportional representation, especially if  better voting systems — approval voting, single transferable vote and instant run-off are three interesting ideas — were implemented as well.

Which is why it will ever happen. The American political system is brittle. Our politicians would rather break it than bend their will to ours. So maybe we should instead start thinking about what comes next.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Broadband Prices: Bernie Sanders and His Gang of Four Are Out of Touch

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Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 1992, US president George HW Bush stumbled over a grocery store price scanner on his way to re-election. Touring a grocers’ convention, Bush gazed in “wonder,” according to the New York Times, at technology well-known to everyone else. Bush went down in history as “out of touch”  with the real America — and as a one-term president.

How much more out of touch than that do you have to be to assert that “just 37 percent of Americans have more than one option for high-speed broadband providers?”

That’s what US Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Al Franken (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) claim in a letter to Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The Senators want Wheeler to investigate what they consider unduly high prices in the cable industry for both television and Internet services.

Their sketchy statistical claim results from concentrating solely on local cable monopolies (which are indeed a bad thing) to the exclusion of satellite TV and Internet companies, DSL and television services offered by phone companies, and cellular Internet.

If the Senators answered their own doors and phones and emptied their own mailboxes now and then, they might understand the situation better.

I live in a suburban area, verging into rural. Fortunately, cable reaches my home, and based on my own needs (my family uses LOTS of bandwidth), I chose the local cable monopoly (Cox) for television, Internet and phone services. But my recycling bin overflows with junk mail begging me to switch  to AT&T U-Verse, Dish Network, DirecTV, a local satellite TV/Internet outfit, or one of several cellular providers. Not to mention the telemarketing calls and door knocks.

I have choices coming out my ears (in addition to all those listed, I can carry my laptop to nearly any business district and suck down all the free Wi-Fi I want). Based on a quick review of coverage maps, I’m confident that nearly 100% of my fellow Americans do as well. Some providers offer more or less. Some charge more or less. Which is cool, since people’s needs vary.

Why the sudden crocodile tears over cable Internet pricing? And  why from these four, of all people?

A few weeks ago, Sanders blamed child hunger in America on the availability of too many brands of deodorant. Now he’s concerned over too few brands of TV and Internet access.

All four Senators volubly supported increasing Internet access prices for “the little people” when they backed the FCC’s recent Title II “net neutrality” power grab. Bandwidth infrastructure costs. Since providers can’t charge bandwidth hogs like YouTube and Netflix a la carte to cover those costs, every end user (including your grandmother, who checks her email once a day and looks at a few funny pictures of cats) is going to end up paying more.

The Gang of Four didn’t care about the little people’s Internet bills then. Why should we believe they do now? To put it bluntly, I don’t.  Neither should you.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In Praise of Sanctuary Cities

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English: A sign at the international boundary ...
A sign at the international boundary between Canada and the United States in Point Roberts, Washington (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Politicians can’t resist the opportunity to pile on to a juicy news story for a quick bit of campaign face time.  The bloodier the better, so in the wake of Kate Steinle’s murder in San Francisco, allegedly at the hands of an “illegal immigrant,” it’s no surprise to see the usual suspects getting their knickers in a public twist over “sanctuary cities.”

A prominent anti-immigration propaganda mill, the Center for Immigration Studies, classifies more than 200  US cities, counties and states as “sanctuary cities.” These political subdivisions, as a matter of public policy, ignore and/or decline to cooperate with the federal government’s immigration regulation schemes.

Those of us who are more concerned with the truth than with exploiting a woman’s death for cheap political gain should support sanctuary cities as an unmitigated good.

Even setting aside several inconvenient facts — the fact that “the borders of the United States” command no more moral significance than the turf lines of any other street gang; the fact that the US Constitution forbids the federal government to regulate immigration; the fact that “illegal immigration” statistically reduces rather than increases violent crime; and the fact that “illegal immigration” keeps the US economy afloat by holding down labor costs and therefore the price of everything from produce to poultry to home construction — sanctuary cities are, quite simply, a bulwark against federal law enforcement overreach which represents a danger to all our freedoms.

FBI agents don’t go around handing out speeding tickets on the streets of Peoria. Policing local traffic isn’t the federal government’s job.

Florida and California don’t have their own navies or customs inspectors. Conducting foreign wars and policing international commerce aren’t duties of the state governments.

Nor is it the duty of any city, county or state government to enforce US immigration law. Each level of government has its own duties and functions. Sanctuary cities are federalism in action.

Every dollar or minute that a police officer in Boston or Boise spends doing Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s job is a dollar or minute that police officer can’t spend doing his or her own job.

To put it a different way, local resources spent enforcing federal immigration law are local resources no longer available to spend on investigating rapes, robberies, murders and thefts. Sanctuary cities have their priorities straight. Opponents of sanctuary cities don’t.

In truth, nothing less than a police state along the lines of the former East Germany could even make a dent in “illegal immigration.” Every dollar spent on that evil and impossible task at ANY level of government is a waste at best and a threat to the public’s freedom and safety at worst. Sanctuary cities guard everyone’s liberty.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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