"If you are sitting at a poker table, and you cannot figure out who the sucker is, then it's you."
Attributed to Paul Newman, Amarillo Slim, Warren Buffet, and many others.
If Texas gerrymanders--and it does--shouldn't Oregon do so as well?
A category error is a misunderstanding of the essential nature of a thing. The classic example is the sentence "Green ideas sleep." The sentence is grammatical, but nonsense. Greenness describes things, not ideas, and green doesn't sleep. Another category error would be to think you are having a debate when the other side thinks it is a gunfight.
The Supreme Court backed away from "calling balls and strikes" on gerrymandering. Chief Justice Roberts said that even when district boundaries "reasonably seem unjust" district boundaries are a political matter to be decided in the two political branches of government, not the courts.
There is a "good government," idea of districting, built around the idea that voters should pick their representatives, not representatives picking their voters. The will of the people is expressed by the people they elect. Presumably, if the overall population of a polity with ten representatives is 55% Democratic in orientation and 45% Republican, and if the districts were "fair," then one would expect about six Democrats to get elected.
Some states have laws in place to establish independent non-partisan, non-political commissions to make districting decisions. Some states do not. Texas and Oregon allow the political branches of government to make the district lines.
Oregon had a tradition of bipartisanship. We have elected Democratic and Republican governors and senators. We have had four out of five Democratic U.S. Representatives in a state with two Republican senators, Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood. Oregon voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 instead of Jimmy Carter, but also for Democrat Mike Dukakis in 1988 instead of George H.W. Bush. Oregon has become more Democratic in recent years. The Oregon vote in the presidential election of 2020 was 56.5% for Biden to 40.1% for Trump, a 16.4% margin.
Texas voted Democratic back in 1968 and 1976 but it is southern, rural, White, and religious--therefore, now Republican. Those demographics are changing. Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth are now the fifth and sixth most populous metropolises in the country. Austin has become hip--the new Brooklyn. They gained two congressional seats because they gained four million people in the past decade. Ninety percent of those new residents are "people of color," i.e. Hispanic, Black, Asian.
Texas has a tradition of aggressive gerrymandering to protect Republican majorities. Texas is still a red state, turning purple, with a Trump-Biden split of 52.2% to 46.4%, a 5.8% margin. The current division of U.S. Representatives from Texas is 25 Republicans to 13 Democrats.
The Texas Tribune wrote:
Republicans constructed the map with incumbent protection in mind — a strategy that focused on bolstering vulnerable GOP seats rather than aggressively adding new seats that could flip from blue to red. However, the map does in fact strengthen Republican positioning overall in Texas, going from 22 to 25 districts that would have voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The number of congressional districts that voted for Joe Biden would have shrunk by one, from 14 to 13.
If Texas Congressional districts were drawn to match the partisan split in the state, Texas would have about two more Republican representatives than Democratic ones, not the ten they have currently. With the two new seats drawn for partisan advantage, the split is intended to go to 25 to 13, a twelve seat advantage.
How can they squeeze out ten "extra" GOP seats? They have the votes in the Texas legislature and a Republican governor, and they can draw lines where they want. They can, so they will, proudly and openly.
It would be a category error for Democrats in Oregon to think this is a televised PGA golf tournament in which technical rules of the game are observed closely and applied punctiliously. This isn't a "fair fight" in a civics class. It is a process in which states that have Republican majorities in the legislature and a Republican governor draw districts to maximize their partisan advantage. This isn't theoretical or proscriptive; it is practical and in place now. Texas is doing it and adding to it.
What should Oregon Democrats do? Understand the category. If it better meets their values, then change the future game nationwide with legislation requiring non-partisan district-making everywhere. In the meantime recognize the game they are in. You are at the table. People around you are playing their hands to win.
Don't be the sucker at the table.
4 comments:
If we include the 1980s as “recent memory”, we can indeed reference Hatfield and Packwood and Gordon Smith and “bipartisanship”. That was the last Republican governor too, Vic Atiyeh. Since then, it’s been thorough and er, progressive Blue dominance up to the current Democratic supermajority, with Bob Smith’s House seat the sole Republican hope.
That Texas map looks like a paint by numbers exercise except the numbers got mixed up. Hard to see but that’s a cute little district on the far West corner just for El Paso. Yet Democrats have far more oomph there than Republicans here. As to representation, didn’t those new people of color choose Texas precisely because it has conservative economic values?
The US has a Progressive majority, but an electoral system that is antiquated and skewed in favor of a rural minority, one that is increasingly racist. Our own county reflects the political divide created by a lack of diversity, aside from being crushingly dull with some really bad restaurants.
As long as we have a significant group of people who would rather be poor than live in a society with equal rights for all, Republicans will continue to take the nation into an two class autocracy.
America does not have a Progressive majority.
I think it would be good if we could have a national prohibition against gerrymandering. Failing that, it’s going to be game on in all of the states.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that any system of logic will bring up questions that are unanswerable within that system of logic. Our combined federal and state governments are one such system, and gerrymandering is a question for which that system has no good answer.
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