Supreme Court to Review Texas Re-Districting

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.