O, the humanity! Again and again, I’ve talked about the unfair process of congressional redistricting. Why won’t they listen?
Here’s the deal: Every ten years, using the new census numbers, brand new political boundary lines are fashioned. These new lines are used to elect representatives at the state and congressional levels. The process has been hijacked by politicians who draw lines that benefit the incumbents. This is all done very scientifically using party affiliation, voting trends, race, income, etc. Recently a congresswoman out in California admitted that the politicians there were bribing the top line-maker with $20,000 per district. But it’s never enough.
Incumbents have come up with yet another method for derailing that most evil of democratic happenings: political competition. Seems congressional lines are not only being drawn to stack the deck in favor of incumbents, they’re also being drawn to cut out likely challengers of the incumbent. In Illinois, wiggly new district lines just happen to mysteriously eliminate potential opponents of incumbents like Congressmen Phil Crane, Tim Johnson, Bobby Rush, and Luis Gutierrez. Sure, this can happen once in a while, by coincidence but this often? And in Congressman Crane’s case it was three separate challengers who got deleted by the re-mapping.
Reforms in Washington state and Arizona take redistricting out of the hands of the politicians and guide it by non-political criteria. It’s about time we did this everywhere.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.