Politics

At long last someone is going to check the legality of the Texas district rigging Tom DeLay pushed through a couple of years back. The story is reported in today’s New York Times: Supreme Court to Review Texas Redistricting Dispute

The result of DeLay’s efforts was to create five extra Republican biased seats in Texas, which contributed to the safety of the Republican hold on Congress. Other states have piled in on the rigging since. What makes Texas so important is that it has a history of racially inspired rigging so egregious that it has to get Federal Justice Department approval for any re-districting plan. The DeLay plan was rejected by the experts at the Justice department when it came up for review. Which is great except that the higher ups at Justice [i.e. the political appointees] overturned their own experts, and consequently the plan was approved in time for the last elections. What a surprise!

The American public seems oblivious to this rigging which goes on pretty much nationwide. Some of the district boundaries in California are farcical — they bare no relation at all to geography, but have a strong correlation with voting patterns. Both parties are involved, although Texas Republicans are so brazen about cheating that it is laughable. No other Western democracy allows politicians to rig their own seats. Were we to hear about this kind of cheating in a small African country we would all laugh out loud at the hopelessly undemocratic nature of such a backward nation.

So why aren’t we up in arms at home? Rigging like the Texas effort deprives us of democracy: the effect is to create seats that are easily defended by whichever party is in power at the time. Over time this means fewer and fewer seats change hands at election time, and we are stuck with lifetime Congressional representatives who have no incentive to listen to the voters because they know they will be safely re-elected. That opens the door for other forms of corruption like the single issue lobbying that dominates Washington.

Let’s face it: our electoral system is a shambles. Maybe the Supreme Court can start to clean it up — we know Congress won’t.

“The principles of the common-law, standing alone, in my opinion compel the exclusion of third-party torture evidence as unreliable, unfair, offensive to ordinary standards of humanity and decency and incompatible with any principles which should animate atribunal seeking to administer justice.” Thus spoke Lord Bingham when he announced the Law Lords decision banning torture from U.K. courts. He went on: “This prohibition is designed to produce a deterrent effect, in that it signals to all members of the international community and the individuals over whom they wield authority that the prohibition of torture is an absolute value from which nobody must deviate.”

His fellow lwayer Lord Hoffman dirtected a comment to the U.S.: “In our own century [he had been talking about the centuries old ban on torture in U.K. common-law] many people in the United States, heirs to that common-law tradition, have felt their country dishonored by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction, and its practice of extra-legal ‘rendition’ of suspects to countries where they would be tortured.”

Couldn’t be clearer than that. Well said. Now we need someone here to pick up the ball. I wonder what the odds are of that?

For what it’s worth here is Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He has cancer so he had to deliver the speech via video link from England rather than in person: Nobel Lecture – Literature 2005.

As usual he is outspoken and extraordinarily eloquent. Love him or hate him, the man can turn a phrase! What a writer. The prize was well deserved.

The U.K. House of Lords decided yesterday that evidence obtained from a prisoner by the use of torture cannot be used in a court case against that person. There are several terrorist cases working there way through the British legal system, and although no one suggests that torture has been used against any of the defendants, the ‘Law Lords’ have acted to clarify the rules. There may be an international impact from this decision: any extradition attempt by the U.S. of a prisoner held in the U.K. may now run afoul of the alleged torture being carried out by the U.S. or its surrogates. At the least a defense lawyer now can cast a reasonable shadow over such a case. This is a practical example of how the Bush administration is potentially hurting our ability to fight terrrorism by its attitude toward torture.

BTW: For those of you who are unaware, the members of the House of Lords known in the vernacular as ‘The Law Lords’ are the U.K. equivalent of the Supreme Court. I believe they are all retired High Court judges.