{"id":132284,"date":"2012-11-09T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2012-11-09T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=132284"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:03:23","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:03:23","slug":"gerrymandering-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/11\/09\/gerrymandering-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The League of Dangerous Mapmakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> The League of Dangerous Mapmakers<\/a> by Robert Draper in The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> Every 10 years, after U.S. census workers have fanned out across the nation, a snowy-haired gentle\u00adman by the name of Tom Hofeller takes up anew his quest to destroy Democrats. He packs his bag and his laptop with its special Maptitude software, kisses his wife of 46 years, pats his West Highland white terrier, Kara, and departs his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for a United States that he will help carve into a jigsaw of disunity.<\/p>\n

Where Hofeller travels depends to some degree on the migratory patterns of his fellow Americans over the previous decade. As the census shows, some states will have swelled in population, while others will have dwindled. The states that gained the most people are entitled, under the Constitution, to additional representation in the form of new congressional districts, which (since the law allows only 435 such districts) are wrenched from the states that lost the most people. After the 2010 census, eight states (all in the South and the West) gained congressional districts, which were stripped from 10 others (in the Midwest and the East Coast, as well as Katrina-ravaged Louisiana).<\/p>\n

The creation of a new congressional district, or the loss of an old one, affects every district around it, necessitating new maps. Even states not adding or losing congressional representatives need new district maps that reflect the population shifts within their borders, so that residents are equally repre\u00adsented no matter where they live. This ritual carving and paring of the United States into 435 sovereign units, known as redistricting, was intended by the Framers solely to keep democracy\u2019s electoral scales balanced. Instead, redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics\u2014a way, as the opportunistic machinations following the 2010 census make evident, for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the past four decades, it is what Tom Hofeller has done for a living.<\/p>\n

Hofeller maintains an office at the Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill, though he is now the RNC\u2019s paid consultant rather than, as in years past, its official redistricting director. At 69, he is a professorial if somewhat impish fellow (in his early days, a California House speaker dubbed him \u201cthe kid with the shit-eating grin\u201d) who is more than content not to be a household name. His after-hours life includes singing tenor in his church choir and reading multitudes of books that seldom have anything to do with politics. Hofeller\u2019s earliest clients included Democrats, and today he describes himself as a moderate Republican. The adjective is irrelevant, however. His chosen field is, according to Georgia Congressman and House Republican redistricting vice chair Lynn Westmoreland, \u201cthe nastiest form of politics that there is\u201d: Tom Hofeller\u2019s objective is to design wombs for his team and tombs for the other guys.<\/p>\n

And so his cyclical travels take him mainly to states where the Republicans are likely to be drawing the new maps. (In most states, an appointed committee consisting of legislators from the majority party produces the map, which is then brought to the legislative body for a vote. Other states relegate the duties to an appointed commission.) At meetings, Hofeller gives a PowerPoint presentation titled \u201cWhat I\u2019ve Learned About Redistricting\u2014The Hard Way!\u201d Like its author, the presentation is both learned and a bit hokey, with admonitions like \u201cExpect the unexpected\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t get \u2018cute.\u2019 Remember, this IS legislation!\u201d He warns legislators to resist the urge to overindulge, to snatch up every desirable precinct within reach, when drawing their own districts.<\/p>\n

But Hofeller\u2019s helpful tips give way to the sinister warnings of a gimlet-eyed, semi-\u00adclandestine political operative: \u201cMake sure your security is real.\u201d \u201cMake sure your computer is in a PRIVATE location.\u201d \u201c?\u2018Emails are the tool of the devil.\u2019 Use personal contact or a safe phone!\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t reveal more than necessary.\u201d \u201cBEWARE of non\u00ad-partisan, or bi\u00ad-partisan, staff bearing gifts. They probably are not your friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Be discreet. Plan ahead. Follow the law. Don\u2019t overreach. Tom Hofeller relishes the blood sport of redistricting, but there is a responsible way\u2014as Hofeller himself demonstrated this past cycle in the artful (if baldly partisan) redrawing of North Carolina\u2019s maps\u2014and also a reckless way. So that his message will penetrate, he tells audiences horror stories about states that ignored his warnings and went with maps that either were tossed out by the federal courts or created more political problems than they solved.<\/p>\n

Already Hofeller has picked out which cautionary tale he will relay during the next decennial tour. The new horror story, he\u2019s decided, will be Texas, which stood, this past cycle, as a powerful example of how reckless a redistricting process can become. That mangled effort also provides a stark contrast to the maps Hofeller helped create in North Carolina\u2014\u00addrawings that demonstrate how in the blood sport of redistricting, the most cravenly political results are won with calculating prudence.<\/p>\n

As the election returns rolled in on the evening of November 2, 2010, Hofeller had already started gearing up for the next round of redistricting. \u201cI\u2019m sitting and watching, less interested than many in the congres\u00adsional races,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI\u2019m the one saying \u2018Okay, so we won Congress. The question is, are we going to keep it?\u2019 And then what I see is that we gained 700 state legislative seats. The night just kept getting better and better. Things happened in some states\u201d\u2014in terms of controlling whole legislative bodies\u2014\u201cthat we never expected. Alabama! North Carolina!\u201d<\/p>\n

It seemed like Reconstruction all over again for the GOP. Because the Republican tsunami coincided with the 2010 census, Tom Hofeller\u2019s party was suddenly able to redraw many of the 435 congressional maps to its own partisan advantage.<\/p>\n

Without asking for guidance from Hofeller or other veterans of the trade, delirious party officials predicted that after all the connivances were set in motion, the GOP would be able to reward itself with an additional 15 safe House seats before a single vote was cast in the 2012 elections.<\/p>\n

It hasn\u2019t quite turned out that way. Partly this is because Democrats understood the stakes and went to extraordinary lengths to blunt the assault. In California, the Democrats (according to e-mails obtained by ProPublica) successfully swayed a newly formed independent citizens\u2019 redistricting commission, through an intricately coordinated guerrilla operation that will likely accrue them six or seven new seats. In Republican-\u00adcontrolled Florida, Nancy Pelosi\u2014in relentless pursuit of the House speakership she lost after the 2010 midterms\u2014helped fund the successful \u201cFair Districts\u201d referendum to ban partisan redistricting. The measure seems to have persuaded Florida map-drawers to exhibit some self-restraint, and thus a number of surefire Republican seats were wiped from the boards. Of course, Pelosi has not suggested that the Fair Districts concept be applied to states where her party wields legislative control, such as Maryland and Illinois, where the Democrats further cut into the GOP\u2019s gains by drawing nakedly partisan maps that simply vaporized Republican-held districts.<\/p>\n

Tom Hofeller certainly did his part to maximize the returns on the GOP\u2019s 2010 electoral bounty. Hired by North Carolina\u2019s top GOP legislators just after the midterms to advise in the drawing of their state\u2019s new maps, the political cartographer spent many hours on the phone with the state legislature\u2019s redistricting chairmen. (Hofeller is careful to avoid leaving an e-mail trail. As his PowerPoint presentation cautions, \u201cA journey to legal HELL starts with but a single misstatement! \u2026 Remember recent e-mail disasters!!!\u201d) While talking, Hofeller would expertly manipulate his computer\u2019s Maptitude software, a lightning-fast graphics system that processes neighborhood population data, including racial composition, so that a user can draw and redraw hypothetical district lines.<\/p>\n

By July 2011, Hofeller had helped produce what a Democratic operative ruefully terms \u201cexceptionally smart\u201d maps\u2014ones that, assuming they survive a lingering court challenge, may very well install a 10\u20133 GOP stronghold in place of the present 7\u20136 Democratic congressional majority.<\/p>\n

Hofeller already knew North Carolina, the focal point of several landmark redistricting cases in which he\u2019d testified, well. The Tar Heel State has a history of election discrimination and is therefore one of the jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that electoral maps be approved by either a federal court or the Justice Department. (Like all other states, North Carolina is also covered by Section 2, which forbids discriminatory practices more broadly.) Hofeller and the other Republican mapmakers therefore took particular care not to \u201cretrogress\u201d the racial makeup of the districts represented by the African-American Democrats G. K. Butter\u00adfield and Mel Watt\u2014since doing so would have meant running afoul of the Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n

Instead, he reserved his chief mischief for the remaining districts. Hofeller and his cohort hoarded several of Raleigh\u2019s white precincts and moved them into the 2nd District, which had been held by Democrats for 108 of the previous 110 years, until a former intensive-care nurse named Renee Ellmers rode the Tea Party wave to an upset victory in 2010. The new drawings would give the neophyte Ellmers a safe Republican district to last at least at decade. Recognizing that North Carolina\u2019s many Democratic voters had to be put somewhere, the map\u00admakers shoveled as many as possible into the Democratic districts of Watt and of David Price, a former Duke professor who represented the liberal bastion of Chapel Hill. Most of those Democrats, however, were stripped from the districts of the moderate Democratic incumbents Mike McIntyre, Larry Kissell, and Brad Miller. In the Democrat Heath Shuler\u2019s 11th District, the mapmakers simply gouged out the progressive core, Asheville, and affixed it to the 10th, the state\u2019s most Republican district over the previous 60 years. The new maps have made quite an impact. Shuler and Miller have announced that they will not seek another term. McIntyre (whose house has now been drawn out of his own district) and Kissell are widely viewed as among the most imperiled Democrats facing reelection in November.<\/p>\n

Progressive groups immediately filed suit challenging the North Carolina maps, contending that the state deliberately diluted minority voting power. Hofeller happens to be an old hand at redistricting litigation, and the maps will probably survive into the next decade. (Meanwhile, in a dazzling show of circular logic, Phil Berger, the top Republican state senator, recently refused to allow consideration of a redistricting-reform bill that he had supported back when his party was in the minority, citing the fact that North Carolina is \u201cengaged in litigation on that issue.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Still, legal battles have been the other major factor in diminishing the Republican Party\u2019s success. Given that blacks and Latinos tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, Republicans have often taken pains to maximize their control of the districts in a way that does not violate the terms of the Voting Rights Act. But the new census results have presented the GOP with a particularly confounding puzzle\u2014one that lies at the center of this cycle\u2019s redistricting controversies. On the one hand, the biggest gains in U.S. population over the past decade have been in two Republican-controlled states: Florida, which thereby received two new congressional districts, and Texas, which was granted a whopping four.<\/p>\n

But on the other hand, most of each state\u2019s new residents are African Americans and (especially) Hispanics. In Texas, the population has swelled by 4.3 million over the past decade. Of those new residents, 2.8 million are Hispanic and more than half a million are African American. While those groups grew at a rate of 42 percent and 22 percent, respectively, the growth in white Texans was a meager 4.2 percent. In other words: without the minority growth, Texas\u2014now officially a majority-minority state\u2014would not have received a single new district. The possibility that a GOP map-drawer would use all those historically Democratic-\u00adleaning transplants as a means of gaining Republican seats might strike a redistricting na\u00eff as undemocratic.<\/p>\n

And yet that\u2019s exactly what the Texas redistricting bosses did last year. Shrugging off the warnings of Tom Hofeller and other Washington Republicans, the Texans produced lavishly brazen maps that resulted in a net gain of four districts for Republicans and none for minority populations. The entirely predictable consequence is that the Texas maps have spent more than a year bouncing between three federal courts, including the Supreme Court. The legal uncertainty has had national ramifications. It meant, for example, postponing the Texas primary from March 6 until May 29, which cost Texas its role as a prominent player in the Super Tuesday presidential sweepstakes\u2014a very lucky break for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, who likely would have lost the state to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.<\/p>\n

But the chaos produced by the overreach in Texas isn\u2019t anomalous. Rather, it is very much in keeping with the new winner-take-all culture of redistricting, an endeavor that has somehow managed to grow in both sophistication and crassness, like an ageless strain of cancer that inhabits a host body for so long that the two seem inseparable, even as the former quietly destroys the latter from the inside out.<\/p>\n

How ingrained is the practice of politically motivated redistricting in America? So ingrained that it existed even before Congress did. Late in 1788, just after Virginia voted to ratify the Constitution and thereby join the Union, Patrick Henry persuaded his state\u2019s legislature to fashion the nascent 5th Congressional District in such a way as to force Henry\u2019s political enemy James Madison, of Mont\u00adpelier, to run against the formidable James Monroe, of Highland. Madison prevailed and later went on to become America\u2019s principal author of the Bill of Rights as well as its fourth president. Serving as his second vice president was Elbridge Gerry, who as the governor of Massachusetts in 1812 had presided over a redrawing of the state map so blatant in its partisan manipulations that the curiously tailored shape of one Boston-area district resembled a salamander. The term gerrymander has been used ever since to describe the contorting of districts beyond all reason save political gain.<\/p>\n

Though the constitutionally intended purpose of re\u00addistricting is to maintain proper apportionment of elected representatives, several states, for much of the 20th century, didn\u2019t bother to adjust their district boundaries at all. The result, in Texas for instance, was that a powerful rural legislator like House Speaker Sam Rayburn could represent some 200,000 voters, while in the adjacent Dallas district, Bruce Alger represented roughly 900,000. In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled that such malapportionment violated the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s guarantee of equal protection under the law. One of the dissenters, Justice Felix Frankfurter, warned against judges\u2019 entering a \u201cpolitical thicket.\u201d The high court subsequently ignored him. In the 1980s, the Court took umbrage at the re\u00addistricting orchestrated by Georgia Democrats and their leader, state Representative Joe Mack Wilson, who flatly declared, \u201cI don\u2019t want to draw nigger districts.\u201d A decade later, the Court argued that efforts to boost minority representation could also go too far, citing Mel Watt\u2019s North Carolina district, a wormy creature of such narrowness that, so it was said, a person driving down Interstate 85 with doors open on both sides could kill people in two districts. Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor tsk-tsked that \u201cappearances do matter,\u201d and the Supreme Court decreed in 1996 that even districts drawn so as to maximize minority representation should retain \u201ccompactness, contiguity and respect for political subdivisions.”<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s admonition notwithstanding, as works of art, redistricting maps continue to evoke a crazed but symbolically rich dreamscape of yearnings, sentimentality, vendettas, and hyper-realism in American political life. Districts weave this way and that to include a Congress member\u2019s childhood school, a mother-in-law\u2019s residence, a wealthy donor\u2019s office, or, out of spite, an adversary\u2019s pet project. When touring Republican strongholds, Tom Hofeller enjoys showing audiences the contours of Georgia\u2019s 13th District, as proposed after the 2010 census, which he likens to \u201cflat-cat roadkill.\u201d (The map that was ultimately approved is shaped more like a squirrel that hasn\u2019t yet been hit by a car.) This redistricting cycle\u2019s focus of wonderment, in Hofeller\u2019s view, is Maryland\u2019s splatter-art 3rd District, which reminds him of an \u201camoeba convention.\u201d He tends not to mention the gimpy-legged facsimile that is his own rendition of North Carolina\u2019s 4th District.<\/p>\n

The byzantine trade of redistricting was long dominated by brainy eccentrics like Hofeller and his Democratic counterparts Mark Gersh and Michael Berman. But that began to change in the 1990s, when the availability of mapping software (such as Maptitude, Red\u00adAppl, and autoBound) and block-by-block census data for the whole country opened up the field to a waiting world of political geeks. The democratization of redistricting\u2014made manifest last year in Virginia, which held a student competition, complete with cash prizes, to draw the best maps\u2014is a lovely thing, perhaps. But as one redistricting veteran told me, \u201cThere\u2019s an old saying: Give a child a hammer, and the world becomes a nail. Give the chairman of a state redistricting committee a powerful enough computer and block-level census data, so that he suddenly discovers he can draw really weird and aggressive districts\u2014and he will.\u201d<\/p>\n

This amateur-hour dynamic presaged the Texas re\u00addistricting fiasco. My native state has a long heritage of bellicose gerrymandering, which began with pronouncedly racist maps drawn by Democrats more than half a century ago and continued with Tom DeLay\u2019s knee-capping of Democratic incumbents in his notorious mid-census redistricting in 2003. But no one ever accused the DeLay machine of being out of its depth. In 2011, by contrast, the individual principally responsible for drawing the state\u2019s congressional district maps, Ryan Downton, was a lawyer and co-owner of a medical-\u00adimaging firm. The seemingly random hiring of a relative novice like Downton (who was defeated in May 2012 as a Republican candidate for the state legislature) was in keeping with a willful ignorance embraced by the state legislature\u2019s two appointed redistricting chiefs, neither of whom had the slightest experience in this arcane field. (Downton says he was hired because of his litigation expertise, since so many redistricting cases end up in court.) As the veteran Texas Democratic redistricting strategist Matt Angle told me, \u201cPeople who actually have an understanding of the Voting Rights Act\u2014like Hofeller, who\u2019s 10 times more competent than the people who drew these maps\u2014they wouldn\u2019t have been part of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to one of the Texas Republicans intimately involved in the map-drawing project, \u201cTom [Hofeller] and [Republican National Committee counsel] Dale Oldham created an adversarial relationship with the leadership here in Texas. Incredibly brilliant people who tend to think they\u2019re right, and if you don\u2019t agree with them, they don\u2019t put much effort towards convincing you. And that rubbed raw with the leadership here in Texas.”<\/p>\n

Whether through personality conflicts or out of hubris, the Texas Republicans decided to do things their own way, with no guidance from Hofeller or other Washingtonians. When I asked Lynn Westmoreland, the House redistricting vice chair, to describe his role in the state\u2019s redistricting process, he replied in a weary voice, \u201cWell, the Texas legislature basically told me, \u2018We\u2019re Texas, and we\u2019re gonna handle our maps.\u2019 You know, I\u2019m just saying that when you have a population increase of 4 million, and the majority of that is minority, you\u2019d better take that into consideration.”<\/p>\n

These statistical realities left the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Rick Perry with three choices when it came to redistricting. They could bow to the demographics, draw three or four new \u201cminority-opportunity districts\u201d\u2014\u00adin which Latino and\/or African American voters would have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice\u2014and then set themselves to the task, as Governor George W. Bush once did, of appealing to the state\u2019s fastest-growing population. Or they could opt for the middle ground and create one or two such districts. Or, says Gerry Hebert, a lawyer who has handled numerous election and redistricting cases for Democrats, \u201cthey could use the redistricting process to cling to what power they have and hang on for as long as they can.”<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I had a breakfast of waffles and fried chicken wings at the Poly Grill, a Fort Worth diner in the heart of a formerly Anglo east-side neighborhood named Polytechnic Heights, which, as a testament to the region\u2019s fluid demographics, is now thoroughly black and Hispanic. With me was Marc Veasey, a 41-year-old African-American Democrat and lifelong Fort Worth resident. Veasey is the community\u2019s representative in the state legislature and would like to be its U.S. congressman. Specifically, Veasey has been expecting one of Texas\u2019 four new districts to be placed here, because of the explosive population growth of blacks and Latinos in the area.<\/p>\n

Many House Republicans, like the Texan and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, reportedly agreed with Veasey that a new minority-\u00adopportunity district belonged here\u2014though for different reasons. Failing to create such a district would mean that each of the half dozen\u2013\u00adplus Republican members of Congress in the Metroplex would have to absorb increasing numbers of minority voters. Several once-safe GOP districts might thereby become swing districts by the end of the decade. Better, as Smith and others saw it, to preserve the existing seats by funneling the minority population into a new district.<\/p>\n

But the Texas map-drawers refused to create such a district in the area. Over breakfast, Veasey explained to me what that lack of minority representation meant. Presently, Polytechnic Heights\u2014one of many minority enclaves in the Metroplex that DeLay\u2019s redistricters spread across five Republican districts, thereby \u201ccracking\u201d a potent voting bloc\u2014falls in the district of Michael Burgess, a white Republican who last year told a local Tea Party group that he favors impeaching President Obama. \u201c[Burgess] goes around saying \u2018I represent more African Americans than any other Republican in the entire U.S. Congress. Look at me, look at my outreach,\u2019?\u201d Veasey said. \u201cThere\u2019s no way African Americans would ever have any influence in this district at all. His votes prove it. His rhetoric proves it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February, after court testimony in San Antonio and Washington, D.C., Veasey and his fellow Democrats prevailed in a suit charging the state of Texas with producing maps that discriminated against blacks and Hispanics. A three-judge panel ordered that the new 33rd District be drawn into Veasey\u2019s stomping grounds\u2014and Veasey promptly entered the race. He won the primary, and in November he\u2019ll likely capture what will presumably be a safe Democratic seat.<\/p>\n

While the San Antonio court awarded the 33rd District to the Democrats, it also left largely intact the state\u2019s drastic redrawing of the 27th District, a territory that includes Corpus Christi, the home of Congressman Blake Farent\u00adhold. In the 2010 election, despite being an Anglo Republican who does not speak Spanish in a district that\u2019s 74 percent Hispanic, Farent\u00adhold upset the longtime Democratic incumbent, Solomon Ortiz, by a margin of about 800 votes. \u201cI won, which disproves the fact that all Hispanics vote Democrat,\u201d Farent\u00adhold told me. \u201cI go back to my premise that most Hispanics, especially in south Texas, if given a test on the issues that would place you as Democrat or Republican, would fall into the Republican category.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Farenthold\u2019s opponent, Ortiz, received 86.6 percent of the Latino votes cast. But Hispanic turnout in the 27th was abysmal that year. The Tea Party\u2013backed Farent\u00adhold garnered more than 80 percent of the non-Latino vote, which put him over the top.<\/p>\n

Over freshly shucked oysters at a Corpus Christi restaurant one after\u00adnoon, I relayed to Farenthold the testimony of the state GOP\u2019s map-drawers: basically, they all acknowledged that Farenthold would have had a hard time being reelected in 2012 if they hadn\u2019t drawn him a friendlier map. District 27, which they obligingly constructed for him last year, sheds the border city of Brownsville, climbs up the coast and swallows portions of Ron Paul\u2019s existing district, then abruptly hooks westward into the deeply conservative Bastrop County. The new configuration resembles a Glock pistol held at a 45-degree angle. If Farent\u00adhold was so sure he had a Hispanic following, I asked him, then why hadn\u2019t he insisted on keeping his district as it was?<\/p>\n

Farenthold, whom I find to be one of the more charmingly plainspoken members of Congress, laughed. \u201cListen,\u201d he said of the new map, \u201cI\u2019ll take a 60-plus [percent] Republican district over a swing district any day. Duh!\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Congress\u2019s low standing, I wondered aloud to Far\u00adent\u00ad\u00adhold whether allowing incumbents like him to escape the wrath of his constituents by installing him in a safer district wasn\u2019t thwarting democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m willing to run on my record in any district I live in,\u201d the freshman maintained. He pointed out that \u201cat least 50 percent\u201d of his new district would be composed of his present constituents. He added, \u201cOn a metaphysical level, sure, there\u2019s gonna be some politics in it. But elections have consequences. You elect a Republican legislature, you\u2019ll get more Republican-drawn districts. It works both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Farenthold if being in the new district would in any way change how he conducted himself. \u201cThe district I\u2019m in now is a swing district,\u201d he said. \u201cThis [new] district is a much stronger Republican district. You say the same thing, but you use different words. Immigration would be an issue\u2014you\u2019re probably not going to change your mind on your core immigration issues, but you\u2019ll be a little softer about how you talk about it in a swing district than in a harder-core Republican district.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his last few years in the House, John Tanner of Tennessee pursued a lonely quest to interest his colleagues in a redistricting-reform bill. Tanner was a co-founder of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who were all but wiped out in 2010, the year Tanner himself decided to head for the sidelines. He had introduced his bill first in 2005, when the Republicans controlled the House, then in 2007 and again in 2009, when Democrats were in charge and Nancy Pelosi was the speaker. \u201cShe and Steny [Hoyer, then the majority leader,] said, \u2018That\u2019s a good idea, we\u2019ll take a look at it,\u2019?\u201d he recalled with a smirk. \u201cBut the hard left and the hard right don\u2019t want it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tanner says that redistricting\u2019s impact has evolved over time, from simply creating safe seats for incumbents to creating rigid conservative and liberal districts, wherein the primary contests are a race to the extremes and the general elections are preordained. \u201cWhen the [final] election [outcome] is [determined] in the party primary\u2014which now it is, in all but less than 100 of the 435 seats\u2014then a member comes [to Washington] politically crippled,\u201d the retired congressman told me. \u201cLook, everyone knows we have a structural deficit, and the only way out of it is to raise revenues and cut entitlements. No one who\u2019s reasonable thinks otherwise. But what happens? The Democrats look over their left shoulder, and if someone suggests cutting a single clerk out of the Department of Agriculture, they go crazy. Republicans look over their right shoulder, and if someone proposes raising taxes on Donald Trump\u2019s income by $10, they say it\u2019ll be the end of the world. So these poor members come to Washington paralyzed, unable to do what they all know must be done to keep the country from going adrift, for fear that they\u2019ll get primaried.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s imposed a parliamentary model on a representative system,\u201d Tanner went on. \u201cIt makes sense for Democrats to vote one way and Republicans to vote another in a parliamentary system. It\u2019s irrational in a representative form of government. So what that\u2019s done is two things. First, it\u2019s made it virtually impossible to compromise. And second, as we\u2019ve seen in this past decade, it\u2019s damn near abolished the ability and responsibility of Congress to hold the executive branch of the same party accountable. The Bush years, we were appropriating $100 billion at a time for the Iraq War with no hearings, for fear that [those would] embarrass the administration. Hell yeah, that\u2019s due to redistricting! The Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration became part of the same team. We\u2019re totally abdicating our responsibility of checks and balances.<\/p>\n

\u201dTanner\u2019s bill (which fellow Blue Dogs Heath Shuler and Jim Cooper reintroduced last year, to similar non-effect) would have established national standards for redistricting and shifted the map-drawing duties from state legislatures to bi\u00adpartisan commissions. Such commissions already exist in a handful of states, while Iowa relies on nonpartisan map-\u00addrawers whose end product is then voted on by the state legislature. Tom Hofeller points to the California citizens\u2019 commission as evidence that politics will inevitably find its way back into the process. \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as nonpartisan,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hofeller insists that the dire consequences of his vocation are overblown. \u201cWe\u2019ve had gerrymandering all along, so there\u2019s no proof that that\u2019s the cause of all the polarization,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that there are two other major factors that are much, much more prevalent than redistricting. One is the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week news media, where you only get noticed if you\u2019re extreme. And the other is McCain-Feingold, which pushed a great deal of money to the extremes.\u201d In limiting the size of financial contributions to national parties, the campaign finance\u2013reform law encouraged donors to funnel their cash to opaque outside groups. (See James Bennet\u2019s cover story on this subject.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s part of the problem,\u201d Tanner conceded when I asked him about the super-PAC ads flooding the airwaves. \u201cBut you can trace how the members got here back to gerry\u00admandering. I don\u2019t give a damn how much money you spend. These guys are gonna be responsive to the people that elected them, to avoid a party primary. And so they come here to represent their political party, not their district or their country. That attitude has infected the Senate, too. Look at Orrin Hatch,\u201d he said, referring to the veteran Utah senator who fought off a primary challenge from an ultra\u00adconservative. \u201cNow you\u2019d think he was an original member of the Tea Party. It makes you sick to see him grovel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some redistricting experts argue that Americans have polarized themselves, by gravitating toward homogenous communities, a demographic trend observed in Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing\u2019s 2008 book, The Big Sort. But, says one Texas Republican map-drawer, \u201credistricting has amplified the Big Sort by creating safe Republican and safe Democratic districts. Look at Texas. If you count [Blake Farent\u00adhold\u2019s] 27th as the result of a fluke election, the [racially polarized West Texas] 23rd is the only swing district in the state.\u201d In this sense, the only difference that the new maps will make is that instead of one swing district out of 32, there will now be one out of 36. As to what this portends, former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, a Democrat, told me, \u201cI won\u2019t mention anyone by name, but I know certain Republicans in the Texas delegation who would be inclined to be more moderate, if they didn\u2019t have to fear a primary challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

One Texas Republican who dipped his toe in the moderate waters, by voting for last summer\u2019s debt-ceiling deal, was Congressman Michael Burgess. Tea Partiers lambasted him to his face, saying, \u201cYou caved.\u201d An analysis by National Journal found that politicians like Burgess were the exception\u2014\u00adthat most House members who voted to raise the debt ceiling were from swing districts, while \u201cthe further a member\u2019s district is from the political center, the more likely it is that he or she opposed the compromise.\u201d<\/p>\n

We know what happened after that whole debacle: the Dow Jones plummeted, Standard & Poor\u2019s downgraded America\u2019s credit rating, and Congress\u2019s approval rating sank to an unprecedented low of 9 percent. That intensity of public disgust has hardly abated, and it is felt across the political spectrum: according to an NBC\/Wall Street Journal poll released this past January, at least 56 percent of all liberals, moderates, and conservatives would like to see everyone in the legislative branch fired this November.<\/p>\n

If this is so, then perhaps Tom Hofeller is right. Perhaps redistricting reform is unnecessary. Perhaps instead the system is self-correcting: the extremists whom the map-\u00addrawers have helped to create will be judged as obstructionists unworthy of their safe seats and, by means of electoral laxative, flushed out of the body politic. Thus cleansed, America can then slowly return to what James Madison called \u201cthis propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities.\u201d When that happens, we know who will be there to draw the battle lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: The League of Dangerous Mapmakers by Robert Draper in The Atlantic. The Text: Every 10 years, after U.S. census workers have fanned out across the nation, a snowy-haired gentle\u00adman by the name of Tom Hofeller takes up anew his quest to destroy Democrats. He packs his bag and his laptop with its special […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe League of Dangerous Mapmakers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Meet the gerrymanderers quietly deciding where your vote goes--and making democracy a lot less democratic.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/11\/09\/gerrymandering-science\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The League of Dangerous Mapmakers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Meet the gerrymanderers quietly deciding where your vote 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