The redistricting going on in Texas right now is absolutely ridiculous. It's an effort by Republicans to take advantage of their majority in Congress and maintain it by creating such circumstances in which no other party can win seats in the House. The question is this: should the Supreme Court prohibit gerrymandering?

The Colorado Supreme Court, facing the same circumstances, ruled the attempted redistricting as unconstitutional.



However:



Personally, I think that the Republicans are forgetting that they won't always hold a majority and that political retribution is always painful.

From THE NEW YORKER---The Great Election Grab

When does gerrymandering become a threat to democracy?


http://www.dashpac.com/home/news/clips.cfm?NewsClipID=803

There is no question that this is detrimental to the democratic process. It has been engineered by both parties at various times. The courts have been ruling against it, as they should. This is definitely an issue that needs to be kept on top of.

The Texas and Colorado situations are truly egregious. If it was the dmeocrats doing likewise, you would have all sorts of people falling all over themselves condeming Clinton. Could you imagine the uproar that would have followed if a Clinton official did like Karl Rove, and had federal resources used to track down errant Republican legislators who fled the state? The anti-government crowd would have had a field day with that one. They would be all over it faster than you could say: "Ruby Ridge"

I'm not certain how you could solve the problem of gerrymandering. I believe the founders probably thought that one party would not have exclusive dominance over the other, or that if gerrymandering occured, that it would occur on a very small basis. I don't see why the boundaries can't be drawn out by a random selection of citizens. Rules? I guess my big one would be that every area had to be contiguous, you can't have pockets of areas separated from one another.

You think this didn't happen? Or are you forgetting about the 'missing' FBI files? And this wasn't even a Clinton official--this was done directly by the Clintons. But I digress....

Can someone please explain how the 'power grab' going on in Texas is any different than any other redistricting scenario--ie, aren't they ALL power grabs? Those harping on the timing of the event are conveniently forgetting that the state never redistricted appropriately at the last census....

None of which addresses what is, to me, the core of the problem: Shouldn't the districting be performed outside of the legislative process? The current system has an inherent conflict of interest--representatives are elected from the districts, and then turn right around and do the districting. There's no way this can be an impartial process--thereby completely biasing the entire election process. Currently, districts are set up to put together voting blocks, when they should be set up solely to group together people from a 'like' community, so that that community can then elect a representative to represent their issues. There's no way you can look at a districting map and say that this was the motivating factor.

I have a feeling that this might not be winning Republicans as many votes as they had hoped. People generally don't like it when you try to undermine democracy.

It is different than other redistricting cases. It's different in that the minority party has always had somewhat of a say as to how districts are drawn up. If you notice that some districts are non-contiguous, that would be an example of two senators agreeing to carve up the democratic and republican areas fairly evenly. The Texas case is completely different in that it looks as if minimal cooperation with the other party wasn't sought after. I would've fled the state to to prevent a quorem.

The Republicans in Texas are doing this and claiming that they can because they didn't get a chance to the first time because the court stepped in to overrule them and impose a different districting map.

Can you see it coming? Who do you think will have to approve this new map the Republicans want to create?

I remember someone stated that the state legislatures should have no jurisdiction over redistricting plans. Perhaps the courts should just arbitrarily draw them up?? Then again, we would probably see politics seep more into the judiciary than it already is.