They are out to get you:
The state of Ohio will lose two congressional seats thanks to the latest U.S. Census figures, and liberal stalwart Dennis Kucinich is worried his seat is on the chopping block.
In an e-mail to supporters Wednesday, the seven-term Democratic congressman and two-time presidential candidate says the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature is likely to eliminate his heavily Democratic Cleveland-area district.
But Kucinich says he’s not just going to stand by while that happens.
It wouldn’t surprise me one tiny bit if this happens. It just wouldn’t.
Erikthe Red
Wouldn’t surprise me, either, but….
…what can he really do about it?
Mike Kay (True Grit)
It’s just Dennis making another transparent request for contributions.
singfoom
He can’t do anything in terms of re-districting. Not sure about the specifics of Ohio, but it comes down to the legislature, which I think is majority-Republican.
Too bad.
cathyx
Republicans always win. That’s because they cheat.
Southern Beale
Well fine, then! He can run for Senate.
:-)
LindaH
@Southern Beale: Sadly the next Senator to run for reelection is Sherrod Brown. He’s a great, sane, strong progressive Democrat and we really can’t afford to lose him. In other words, he’s right on all the issues and isn’t as flaky as Denny can be. Denny would have to wait for 6 years to go up against our new Republican Senator. OTOH, if anyone can pull out a win, Denny might do it. And yes, I call him Denny since I’ve been around long enough to remember when he first entered politics. I love the guy, but he doesn’t come across as well he could.
Cris
Activist Census Bureau!
burnspbesq
@Erikthe Red:
You beat me to it. That is the crux of the biscuit, as a certain crazy genius once said.
BTW, in case you need to be reminded that Republicans are pathological liars who delight in sodomizing the American people (literally and figuratively), read this.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3359
Napoleon
Having been in the Cleveland area most of my life I have learned to hate Dennis with a red hot passion. He is a walking, talking billboard for everything the press and the right can use against the left. If any Dem gets redistrict out, the Reps would be doing the Dems a favor to send him to the gallows.
El Cid
Didn’t want to put this in the happy Open Thread, but apparently the Pope is hip to how all us young modern people don’t think pedophilia’s such a bad thing unlike our stuffy predecessors, so maybe we really shouldn’t get so excited just ’cause Catholic Church employees were ahead of the times.
I have to admit to being surprised by nearly every major development in the Catholic molestation, abuse, and pedophilia habit exposes, and thus being disappointed that I was no where near as cynical as I would have liked.
But for the life of me I didn’t anticipate anyone, much less the Pope (I mean before the whole scandal exploded publicly to the degree it did, not that I had the slightest bit of respect for the Pope), making the argument that, you see, pedophilia and child pornography are seen as much more normal now. You know, because there’s a lot of child pornography.
And if I had, I wouldn’t have expected this to be said on Christmas!
dand
If they make a couple competitive districts out of one dominant Dem, it could be a good thing. Not that they would do that intentionally but maybe just reflectively to get rid of a big bad lib.
General Stuck
Don’t that much about northern Ohio, other than it is mostly blue, so it might be harder to squeeze out Dennis than some other areas of the state.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@El Cid: I gotta start reading the newspapers, exactly when did Roman Polanski become the Pope?
Cris
Wishing death upon your political enemies isn’t kosher!
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Cris: Man are you bad at this game. That death reference was directed at a Democrat, which means it is allowed. Reread your rulebook.
burnspbesq
Let’s see what the new Ohio map looks like. Short of shooting them down in the street, the Repubs can’t make the people who have historically voted for Kucinich disappear. The best they can hope to do is split them into multiple districts and force Kucinich to run against a Republican incumbent in a purple city-and-suburbs district.
This could also play out another way. In the last redistricting here in OC, the Repubs connived to gerrymander all of the majority-Hispanic enclaves into one district. So we ended up with a safe district for Loretta Sanchez and five safe districts for clowns like Rohrbacher and Royce.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@El Cid: maybe it’s a catholic thing. I was watching tweety a couple of days ago and he said he had a crush on Diane Lane since seeing her in her film debut, “A Little Romance” (see photo of the then 13 year Lane, here). Talk about nauseating.
Svensker
@El Cid:
Good grief. The mind simply reels.
Cris
@Barb (formerly Gex): Ach, rookie move on my part
amk
@Napoleon: yeah, that’s why he is a 7 term congress man. Sheesh.
burnspbesq
This will make some folks around here happy. Illinois is about to go up 16-0 on Baylor.
amk
@El Cid: ratzi, the nazi at his sermonizing best.
ruemara
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
Congratulations on the winning of the internets! Where may I have yours delivered?
Steaming Pile
@Napoleon: Which is why I say it won’t happen. If anything, they’ll try to pack even more Democrats into his district, just to keep him in the Congress, where he can continue to be the best strawman the Republicans ever had.
freelancer
@El Cid:
Well they’ve institutionalized it to the point of normalcy within the Vatican. Then they have the stones to blame secularism and atheism for its larger “societal” transgressions that lead to things like clergy raping children.
Fucking repressive vampires.
John W.
They’re probably going to combine his district (west side of Cleveland) and the one on the East side of Cleveland where Stephanie Tubbs Jones used to be (where Marcia Fudge is now). And in a Dem v. Dem primary. I’d like his chances, but it’d depend on turnout. But without a meaningful presidential primary (we hope), it should be activist dominated, and that’s Dennis’ base.
He’ll be fine. Democrats in Ohio en masse? Not so much.
(The other alternative is they pit him against Betty Sutton out west. That might be worse for him – the richer suburbs might prefer the stability of Sutton over the brashness of Kucinich).
I’d love to see him do something out of the box, but that’s not gonna happen. He’s running against one of those two.
MikeJ
@El Cid:
Ever wonder why the bible doesn’t talk about JC’s years as an altar boy?
Keith G
@burnspbesq:
It seems to me that there could be a way to take some of the political gamesmanship out of this process.
Develop a mapping program that will use census tract data (and not voter data) to draw the appropriate number of single member districts for each state. Use algorithms that keep the districts as condensed as possible – even respecting county and city boundaries (and the like) as much as possible.
Have the program spit out a half dozen or so varied maps than chose one.
Gerrymandered safe districts are a bane on our polity.
kdaug
@El Cid: Though, you got to admit, once a Hitler Youth was made Pope, the expectations had to be lowered a bit.
Aaron S. Veenstra
Maybe, maybe not. The way gerrymandering works is to shove as many of the opponent’s voters into as few districts as possible. Those become safe for them, but the majority of the districts become fairly likely wins for you. Kucinich will still be in a strongly Democratic district, with a decent national fundraising base. And Republicans have good reason to want to keep him around, since he doesn’t actually accomplish anything and is a terrific caricature of “The Left.”
Mike Kay (True Grit)
Far Left Really is Far Left
In a new Gallup poll, a stunning 91% of self described Liberal Democrats approve of President Obama. Let me emphasis, that is among respondents who proudly pronounce themselves as Liberals, and not simply Democrats. His ratings with Moderate Democrats and Conservative Democrats stand at 81% and 75%, respectively.
I bet if FDL conducted a site poll, 99% of their readers would say they disapprove of the President.
So how would you describe the segment of the left who so strongly disagree with the vast majority of “true liberals” — why, the Far Left, of course.
JGabriel
John Cole:
Of course not. If there were two seats about to be lost to census changes and Dems were in charge of the Ohio legislature, I’d expect them to wipe out a GOP leaning district, preferably the district of someone well-known and with a lot of seniority.
That’s politics. It sucks for the people on the losing end, which is us this go around,
.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
Hang on one sec, I have to go vomit first …
Okay. This sounds like yet another iteration of the bullshit claim that somehow the sexual revolution is the cause of all things bad in modern society, because it “normalizes” things like women using contraception to limit their family size, which is exactly the same thing as raping a child.
There’s this Jane Fonda movie from the 1970s called Klute that basically takes that same notion as its thesis and says that if one kind of sexual freedom is increased, all kinds are increased the same way:
stuckinred
@Mnemosyne: “I’ll swing from the shower rod and whistle Maytime”!
stuckinred
HONOLULU — President Barack Obama bypassed the Senate Wednesday to make six recess appointments, including a deputy attorney general whose links to the insurance giant American International Group had stalled his confirmation.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
If you turn on CNN this very second, Kuchinich is on.
But guess what, he’s in CNN’s Washington studio and not in his home district of Cleveland.
way to keep in touch with your people, dennis.
JGabriel
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
To start, I wouldn’t call self-described liberals the left. Liberal is center to center-left.
Communists, anarcho-syndicalists, anti-authoritarian commune dwellers, that’s the far left.
European-style SociaIism, Social Democrats, Pro-union social progressives, that’s the left.
Liberals are center to center-left, and neo-libs are center to center-right.
I would put most of the FDL crowd in the left, not the far-left — though, of course, there are some exceptions.
.
stormhit
@El Cid:
That’s really all just a very sloppy breakdown of what he said. Which is typical when it applies to him. Granted, he does tend to have some fairly stupid views; but in this case he actually was citing specific aspects of German kinderladen movement in the 70s.
Referencing a specific event and then using it as an example in his ongoing argument that moral relativity causes problems isn’t really new or terribly offensive.
mr. whipple
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
I would bet there are other ‘liberal’ sites that would poll that high, too. There are very few sane sites left.
No, I’d call them the fucking maniacally enraged dingleberries.
El Cid
It was one thing for the Catholic Church to cynically protect its own bureaucracy and not give a shit about the evils of the violations and abuses.
Thus the Pope would say things as you’d expect — we did what we could, these issues weren’t raised as early as they should have been, some incidents may have been exaggerated, the people making the most noise are anti-Church ideologues, and the Church has done and is now doing everything it can to make it right, etc…
It’s another thing entirely to try and claim that it’s the fault of wider society to have made child pornography and pedophilia considered more normal.
I just can’t recall a recent occasion on which I had heard anyone suggest that we just don’t take offense to pedophilia and child pornography as much as we used to, that maybe it’s more normal since the 1970s.
JBerardi
@El Cid:
Is there one good reason that the Catholic church should even be allowed to exist? Honest question.
JBerardi
@El Cid:
I think it’s possible that the doddering old man is unable to make the distinction between people being increasingly open about certain topics without necessarily approving of them any more than they once did.
stuckinred
@JBerardi: Just who is going to un-allow it?
Sasha
@Keith G:
A-effin’-men.
I am so glad that antigerrymandering Amendments 5 & 6 passed in Florida.
Violet
@Keith G:
I wish all states would do this. Didn’t Florida pass something in this election requiring better districting? It seems really easy to do something like this. We’d all be better off for it.
Southern Beale
Oh, how far they’ve fallen: Judith Miller, once of the lofty New York Times, is now a correspondent for … wait for it … Newsmax.
This has been today’s schadenfreude.
Cacti
I know this is like asking for punishment, but we’re long past due to increase the size of congress/number of reps.
The legislation setting the number at 435 was passed in 1912, when the national population was about 95 million.
So, we’ve gone from 1 Representative per 218,390 people to 1 Representative per 705,762.
Many states like Ohio didn’t actually lose population since 2000, they just didn’t grow as fast as other states. In reality, Ohio has about 200,000 more people in 2010 that will be represented by 2 fewer congressmen.
California’s population grew by 3 million and will get no new representatives, that’s almost half the entire population of Arizona, who will get 1 new representative.
Gustopher
Perhaps Ratzi the Nazi just means that pedophilia has been normalized within the Church.
But, if anything, I think pedophilia is less accepted now than it was.
When I grew up, pedophile priests were a source of black humor, much like prison rape is today. Then, one day, people started getting offended, lawsuits were being filed, and charges pressed. Not sure what happened, but the Catholic Church never seemed to notice it happened, despite getting sued.
JBerardi
@stuckinred:
No one; that’s not really the point of the question.
ldrks
It’s hard to believe that Kucinich would be able to win the democratic primary in a majority black district, given his history of race bating.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike Kay (True Grit): 85% approval among Democrats, and CNN gave prime time air to discussing the inevitable primary challenge. Since we’re talking about Ohio: Beam me up!
Alex S.
@Napoleon:
I have to say that I agree. Kucinich must be one of the most liberal/left congressmen of the country. His district is probably so extremely democratic, it cannot be split into 2-3 safe republican districts that easily. And Kucinich is one of the guys who can attack Obama from the left and get attention. And attacks on Obama from the left have no downside for republicans. They only hurt him.
Mnemosyne
@Cacti:
I agree. The number of citizens per representative is just insane now.
I think I remember reading that if the size of the House had kept up with population growth, we should be well over 1,000 Representatives by now.
Cacti
@Gustopher:
This.
Mandatory reporting laws are a very recent phenomenon.
Maude
@JBerardi:
I wouldn’t allow him to babysit.
stuckinred
@JBerardi: So there is not one positive thing the church does? Serious question.
Southern Beale
@Alex S.:
Not true. They certainly cast Republicans as the losers, fakers, poseurs and handmaidens to the plutocrats which they are.
cmorenc
@LindaH:
Now, that’s a colossal understatement. He’s usually on-board the progressive side come crunch-time with critical votes, but OTOH too much of the time he’s a Don Quixote strutting peacock. It still makes my eyes roll to think about the time when, during one of the 2004 Democratic Presidential Primary debates, Kucinich said that, in addition to (and in balance of) the Department of Defense, “there ought to be a Department of Peace”. Yeah, Dennis I got the rhetorical point you were trying to make here, but well, duh we already have one, only it’s called the “State Department”. And you just came across as a hopelessly naive dweeb to millions of voters, and made Al Sharpton look like the more sanely reasonable person in the room than you. Making Sharpton look good in side-by-side by comparison wasn’t all that easy to accomplish, but you did it that night.
Southern Beale
@El Cid:
Ah yes because when I think of Christmas and the sweet baby Jesus lying in the manger I immediately think of CHILD PORN.
/snark
El Cid
@stormhit: Well, there you go.
Right? You know, there were some Germans who sent their kids to schools which encouraged fondling between children and adults and shit. And some cultural leftists etc. also supported sexual interactions between adults and children. And then there was a group NAMBLA that was formed. And that too is a reflection upon wider society. Now, it’s true that these were suggestions widely and harshly condemned by society in general, heterosexual and homosexual alike, but, still, it was there.
And the fact that they were on the left meant something like the left has all sorts of influence on society, and plus it’s important because the Church is not on the left (at least not after they supported the slaughter of the liberation theology movement in Latin America), so the instant horror people expressed toward Papal sentiments without seeing this important context clearly indicates peoples’ biases against conservative institutions.
So obviously this suggests that there really is a change in the views of wider society about child pornography and pedophilia, so, clearly we need to focus more frequently on how the 1970s changed all our views on those two things.
There were some celebrities who wanted the release of Roman Polanski. Think of all that implies. It must imply a lot.
This is a good point — clearly it’s wrong to focus entirely on the continual and protected and excused abuses by the Catholic Church’s employees and hierarchies to the extent that we ignore how some 1970s movements with some figures who maintain significant positions today made us all take pedophilia and child pornography less seriously. Likewise the existence of a few celebrities defending Roman Polanski suggests that we’re all a bit cooler with rape, because nobody ever before wanted a celebrity or politician to skate from rape charges.
Just like how polygamous societies in certain churches in this country, currently smaller sects or not, helped wider society attack the notion that marriages are between two people. Or how the leader of Focus on the Family said that the father should shower with his son so that looking at his father’s penis and noticing it’s bigger will help protect the child from homosexuality.
Or how Ayn Rand’s admiration for a kidnapper, serial killer, and child-dismemberer set the stage for a libertarian movement whose leader, Alan Greenspan, was once the head of the Federal Reserve, even though we accepted his membership in this cult group founded by the a serial killer fetishist. And there has been such a stream of movies and TV shows and novels about serial killers that we are on the verge of considering serial killing far more normal than we used to.
I understand now. And I feel bad about focusing too much of my attention on the horrors committed by Catholic Church employees and the leadership’s role in facilitating and protecting and covering up for that, instead of recognizing that we have a more widespread problem, which is that people just don’t take pedophilia and child pornography as seriously anymore as they used to.
The fact that governments such as ours take unbelievably strong interventions against the two, including prosecuting people who collect drawings and cartoons not based on real children of child pornography are arrested and prosecuted, is just an indicator of how much governments have to work to remind the rest of us that things like pedophilia and child pornography are as bad as they ever were. Likewise these TV shows which lure pedophiles into traps are aired primarily to try to teach us that pedophilia is wrong.
It’s hard work, but it’s going to take a long time to reverse the normalization of child pornography and pedophilia we’ve all come to somewhat accept given some movements of the 1970s in Germany and France, and also the existence of a few celebrities who took the side of Roman Polanski.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: and that is why CNN is dying. 10 years from now they won’t be on any cable systems.
Davis X. Machina
@cmorenc: The local Kucinich people tied up my state’s 2004 Democratic convention for hours on a platform plank calling for a state-level Department of Peace, to the point where the motion to direct our House members to call for investigation of possible impeachable offenses by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, in warrentless wire-tapping, etc., the motion that had put the bums in the seats in the first place, was probably not properly passed because by then a quorum may not have been obtained.
amk
Don’t please witch-hunt me, sez the DE witch. Hilarious read.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2010/12/29/is-there-a-case-against-christine-o-donnell.aspx
JBerardi
@stuckinred:
I guess there’s positive things the church does. I mean, I’m sure AIDS has killed some people who really deserved it… doesn’t mean it should exist.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Violet: Violet, Keith, such programs exist and work well. Without a doubt, they’d provide for the most objectively fair representation possible for everyone.
And you’ll never, ever see them used by anyone except those who want to point out how fucked up the most recent round of gerrymandering was.
Republicans and Democrats alike (though not all at once, it would depend on the state and district, of course) would howl in indignation at the very THOUGHT of a soulless, bloodless machine determining the future of our great Democracy!
sherifffruitfly
DADT repeal happening after the election, and now this: serves worthless pieces of shit “true progressives” right for doing everything they could to put down Obama and the Democrats for the months and 1.5 years before the election.
Fuck ’em. They deserve it.
Linda Featheringill
@cmorenc:
Dennis is a little Quixotic at times. Is that bad?
And you, in your great wisdom: Suggest another representative that actually gives a shit about the people in Dennis’s district.
Southern Beale
OT … Just took one of those free online career test thingies, the kind where they ask the same question 4 different ways. Here’s what I got:
Pretty accurate, I’d say.
Karen
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
No. 98% of their readers would say that Hillary should take down Obama in a coup. 1% would say they approve of Obama and those readers would get death threats. The other 1% would be neutral and would get made fun of.
tkogrumpy
@mr. whipple: I’m devastated!
tkogrumpy
@cmorenc: I remember my dick shriveling up when he said that.
Karen
@El Cid:
If anything as a culture, we’re hypervigilant about anything that even presents the appearance of child porn without it actually being child porn – teenagers sexting each other and getting tossed in jail for example. Or tossing boys in jail for having sex with girls younger by two years or less (18 year old boy, 16 year old girl). No it’s not by any means considered to be normal here.
I think what the Pope said is the most disgusting, provocative thing I’ve ever heard but I want to hear people like Bill Donahue of the Catholic League have to say. Probably nothing.
Carol
Turn the church over to the nuns. While there have been some scandals, the nuns actually care about the kids and have been doing the majority of the work anyway. Nuns have been doing the work of reform quietly, making their life more normal and also raising the standard of their recruits as well.
Karen
@Carol:
The nuns are the ones helping the poor and helpless. And they don’t pass judgment on the victims.
JGabriel
Christine O’Donnell via amk:
Why would any Democrats go after her? O’Donnell is one of the best things to happen to us in the 2010 election. Someone please tell Melanie Sloan & CREW to back off O’Donnell!
.
KCinDC
@Evolved Deep Southerner, Keith G, Violet, the more you think about redistricting, the less obvious and easy it seems. Programs can be written, but the big question is what objectives the program is going to be written to accomplish. Compact districts? Keeping communities together? Preserving existing districts as much as possible? Making elections competitive? Producing a congressional delegation that’s likely to resemble the overall party breakdown within the state? Some of these goals are contradictory, and it’s not clear which should take precedence when they conflict.
For example, drawing compact districts may seem nonpartisan, but if it’s not done with care it will lead to overrepresentation of Republicans. Democrats tend to be clustered in cities, while Republicans tend to be dispersed in more rural areas. So if you draw compact districts by some automated process that ignores parties, you’ll get some 70-75% D districts and a bunch more 50-60% R ones, and your state delegation will be more Republican than the voters in the state are.
Southern Beale
@JGabriel:
It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to portray Christine O’Donnell as a perpetual victim, silly! See Palin, Sarah.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Southern Beale: …and it’s a very high quality schadenfreude indeed.
Joe Buck
The Cleveland area has lost population, so clearly there will be a game of musical chairs in that area. But all the neighboring seats are Democratic as well, so there isn’t a way to split Kucinich’s seat and have Republicans representing part of Cleveland.
A zone where there are currently five Democratic seats will have fewer seats, so someone’s going to be out.
Jim, Once
@Carol:
Word.
Chuck Butcher
@KCinDC:
Oregon is a case in point, with 5 CDs four of which are (D) fairly safely (with their current Reps) and one, OR2, which has been {R} since the mid-80s. OR2 is everything east of the Cascades and a jog across the mountains to get the Medford area to make the population. It is bigger than any state east of the Mississippi and is rectangular with a bump where it picks up Medford. There isn’t any “community” involved other than rural and dry but to try other lines would be ridiculous.
When there was talk about OR getting a 6th CD everyone started casting eyes on OR2 and every map was a nightmare starting from ridiculous to assinine.
The thing to be said for OR2 is that as it sets a Rep has fairly congruent interests to consider. It certainly isn’t compact but there is no way to compact it. You could draw stripes across the state, but the only result of that would be to subsume the interests of this part of the state to the “wet side” ones and make a Rep candidate’s life miserable unless he decided to just ignore the handful of votes on the dry side. In the foreseeable future this one will be ‘red,’ but that has more to do with perceptions than real policy.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Gustopher: This is the earliest one I remember: Mount Cashel in St. John, Newfoundland. This case changed everything here in Canada: a lot of dominoes fell after this case started coming out. In my memory, this precursed all the scandals about the residential schools, abuse in the Anglican church, and so on.
Zach
My money’s on the GOP overestimating how their results in 2010 will carry over to 2012 and really screwing up in their gerrymandering efforts. You’d think that there would be a few capable Republicans available for consulting gigs to get gerrymandering right, but judging from the GOP-controlled state that I’m most familiar with (Kansas), the job will inevitably be done by the utterly incompetent.
polyorchnid octopunch
@JBerardi: What are you going to do, eliminate 2/3 of the population of Quebec? You know, I’ve lived there, they’re great people. Get lost.
polyorchnid octopunch
@KCinDC: Not if the districts are truly equal in population. In Montreal, there’s a new provincial riding every three blocks in some parts of the city.
Zach
@Keith G:
Could you imagine a law that would lay out that algorithm in an unambiguous way? There are any number of seemingly fair algorithms that will result in maps that heavily favor one party over the other.
Also, gerrymandering is not about creating safe districts; it’s about winning as many seats as possible. This means giving the other party districts with as close to 100% of the vote as possible and splitting the other districts to give your party a good, but not guaranteed, chance at the other seats. This is where you can really go wrong with drawing up a map, and I suspect that several state parties will base their map on the 2010 results and screw themselves over for the next decade.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@KCinDC: Good points. For a historical parallel on a smaller scale, there was Georgia’s “county unit system” which was designed to neuter Atlanta and let the hicks preserve their upper hand.
Still, of the considerations you list, compact districts and keeping communities together would have to be the overriding concerns. The rest of them would have to work themselves out over time and over successive, impartial reapportionments.
Besides, as long as we have the Electoral College and every other fucked-up iteration of a “winner take all” system, and there is no popular demand for “one person, one vote” – and I see no serious movement in that direction – there’s only going to be so much you can ever do.
KCinDC
@Evolved Deep Southerner, well, I’m certainly not on board with that, then. I see no reason why I should value compactness so highly that I’d favor rigging the system further in favor of Republicans, and I don’t know how many reformers would feel as you do either. Hell, the main complaint I hear about gerrymandering is usually that people want more competitive elections, so I’d assume that would be the priority for lots of people.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Karen: Win!
Evolved Deep Southerner
@KCinDC: If a contiguous swath of your state is ignorant, red(neck)-as-hell wasteland – and that would describe pretty well the vast majority of Georgia (hate to use that as an example again, but it’s my home state) south of Atlanta – contorting district boundaries just to ensure “more competitive elections” … damn, is that not gerrymandering of a different sort? I’m not on board with that, either. Besides, how far can you (or an algorithm) really set up a maximally competitive playing field. “Perfect candidates” for given districts implode pretty regularly and dark horses do win.
Of the remaining, unaddressed possible goals of “fair redistricting” you laid out at #75 – “preserving existing districts as much as possible” and “producing a congressional delegation that’s likely to resemble the overall party breakdown within the state” – I wouldn’t be down with those at all. The existing districts are FUBARED in many, if not most states, and, honestly, redistricting should be DIVORCED from party whenever possible, no matter who that helps or hurts, or reapportionment/redistricting just becomes a tool for perpetuating the two-party system.
I’ll have to look it up, but I’m pretty sure the Voting Rights Act mandates some racial considerations in the drawing of your district lines to prevent truly grievous “packing” and “cracking,” so that would probably have to be your third consideration, legally, after compactness and community contiguousness (contiguity?)
But stacking the deck to make it “more competitive?” That’s simply another way to contort some districts into what they’re not.
Kath
@Carol: …and sometimes not so quietly, they came out pretty defiantly for Health Care Reform. And they have resisted serious efforts by the Vatican to shut them down. Some of the Jesuit brothers have been very critical of cover up of pedophile priests and have written a great deal on the importance of truth and reconciliation courts. I have really come to admire the tenacity of dissent in the tradition. Yes, time to turn the magisterium over to the ladies.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@KCinDC: Here’s a decent overview. Some several years old, but still pertinent to what we’re talking about, I think. ETA: Not dated, but prescient, the more closely I read it.
Lurker
@Karen:
Don’t forget the Iowa comic book collector who got six months in prison for owning manga featuring “obscene visual representations of minors engaged in sexual conduct.” He did not own any photographic pornography, and he did not harm a child.
I don’t see how our society considers the subject “more normal” if we’re going after Americans who merely own drawings.
JBerardi
@polyorchnid octopunch:
I don’t understand your point. The Catholic church made all those people good, is it?
Michael
No loss.
He sponsors little legislation that passes and is a living cartoon about everything that is laughable about left ideologues.
Further, as he is the living embodiment of the hopes and dreams of the most manic of the bicycle riding vegan womynyst post-patriarchy male EmoProg activists, he needs to be crushed like a bug on a speeding truck grill.
Gozer
@burnspbesq:
Kudos for the Zappa reference…
daveNYC
Yeah, this sucks. The wankerfest Republicans can wrangle out more seats just by winning the state legislatures in the redistricting years and getting their gerrymander on.
KCinDC
@Evolved Deep Southerner, I’m not putting competitiveness forward as the foremost object, just saying that lots of people would. All I’m saying is I don’t agree that compactness should trump all other considerations, especially when urban areas are already underrepresented enough under the current system.
Geographic considerations are important, and people who live in a certain area have some interests in common. But not all interests are related to geography, and I think it’s important for interests related to income or age or ethnicity or religion (or lack thereof) or various political beliefs to be represented as well. I think multimember districts with ranked-choice or cumulative voting might be a way of getting more representative representatives, including more members of minority ethnic groups. Unfortunately I think the Voting Rights Act prevents that.
By the way, the Voting Rights Act considerations don’t conflict with the overrepresentation of Republicans I’m talking about. The majority-minority districts are precisely the sort of 75-80% Democratic districts I referred to that result in fewer Democrats in the House. Republicans are perfectly happy to pack more Democrats into districts like that because it means they have a better chance of winning more of the other districts.
xian
the O’Donnell thing sounds like a preemptive strike.
Gozer
I’m sorry, but Kucinich is not an effective legislator and his past opportunism vis a vis race leaves me less than sympathetic to him.
Evolved Deep Southerner
And you think the state legislatures will do a fair and even-handed job drawing the lines based on that stuff?
Yeah, the Voting Rights Act and a lot of other statutes. I think you’d have better luck working hard for a third-party (or multi-party) system than you would bringing about these changes.
In an ideal world, yes, all of these things would be great, and all districts would be perfect mixes of heterogeneity and homogeneity, but the fact is, the only two objective and (relatively) inarguable ways you can draw districts are those that are 1. comparable in size and 2. geographically compact.
Even if you don’t value geographic contiguity – and you clearly don’t, and that’s fine, I understand your argument against it – arguing for districts of disparate sizes in the name of some of the other goals you enumerate is a tough argument to make, isn’t it? Once you eschew that, you institutionalize over- and under-representation where the votes cast in sparsely populated districts count for more than those cast in more densely populated ones.
Speaking of population density, as far as the urban under-representation question goes, about the only defensible solution I can see is to slice up the cities pie-like by population and have districts radiate outward from them like spokes, but that damn sure won’t make people happy, and I imagine it would exaggerate rather than solve the problem.
It’s tough, for sure. There’s a helluva lot more to it than might meet the eye at first glance. But to think you’re going to do it in any way that will make a deep-red or deep-blue state competitive … it’s a fool’s errand. Democrats are going to have a tough go of it in deep red states no matter what you do, and to try to give those Democrats an easier go of it in those states will be like trying to teach a pig (i.e., the voters) to sing: It’s not going to work and it’ll just make the pig mad at you for trying.
PanAmerican
@Zach:
I’m inclined to agree. The GOP is stuck trying to defend freshman in marginal seats. Trying to cast voters from two Democratic seats into these districts is asking for trouble.
Ailuridae
@Cacti:
I am a big advocate of the Wyoming rule which seems to solve this problem pretty gracefully.
Carl Nyberg
My take on Dennis Kucinich is that he’s noteworthy in his ineffectiveness at passing legislation.
He introduces bills and then moves on to doing something that gets himself attention in Lefty activists circles.
Kucinich is often right on issues, but it’s not because of this rigorous thinking. It’s just b/c mainstream political discourse has moved so far to the insane that if you bet on the Left every time, you’re going to be right on the issues most of the time.
But Kucinich prioritizes poorly and does little to nothing to follow through on legislation.
Kucinich has had his chance. He really hasn’t accomplished much. It’s time to move on.
Pat
If his seat is eliminated then maybe its a sign that he is the guy to form a third party and run for president in 2012.
I would support him in a heartbeat.
Keith G
@KCinDC: I defiantly see your points.
Many of those 50-60% R districts would be the type of swing districts that Can become consistently competitive, forcing whomever the officeholder is to be moderate and sensitive to independents.
KCinDC
@Evolved Deep Southerner, I don’t think anyone believes deep red (or deep blue) states can be made competitive overall, and as I said, I’m not even arguing that making as many districts as possible competitive (which would be doable) should be a priority, just saying that many, many people have that as their main reason for wanting to end gerrymandering.
I’m not recommending a particular solution, but saying that the situation is a lot more complicated than those recommending the easy computer program think. And I’m emphatically rejecting elevating compactness above all other considerations, because I think the system is rigged quite enough in favor of Republican control without adding that advantage to it.
And I certainly never said anything about having districts of unequal size (unless you’re referring to multimember districts being bigger than single-member districts). Of course each representative should represent as close to the same number of people as possible (I’d even support increasing the size of the House to make the sizes more equal).
I’m pretty sure the Voting Rights Act provisions are the main legal obstacle to multimember districts, since extra at-large representatives existed in some states earlier on. Multimember districts aren’t really that unprecedented, bizarre, or un-American. At the state legislative level we already have them in Maryland, for example.
rickstersherpa
@El Cid: I would say that this was Pope Benedict’s typically ham-handed way of expressing himself that it was it was the looney, sexual revolutionary Zeitgeist in the West of the late 1960s and 1970s that brought corrupted certain members of the Catholic Church and also made hierarchy of the time non-hostile to paedophilia. It is a meme that he and his retro-Tridentine allies in the Church and reactionary laity (very rich and in Europe Aristrocratic families) as part of the overall narrative they put out that all current problems in the Church flow from Vatican II and the Church’s liberal course under John XXIII and Paul VI. As such of course it is an evasion of responsibility and utter bullshit. As this stuff has been uncovered, some of the worse crimes took place in those beloved pre-Vatican II1950s. And then there is the record of abuse in Ireland, which was still a priest-ridden back-water in the 1960s and 70s where one could not even buy books by Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, or James Joyce before the late 1970s, and as Sinead O’Connor has so beautifully both sexual and physical abuse of girls and young women was pratically national and Church policy.
rickstersherpa
Basically, what will happen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan is that the Republicans will try to put as many Democrats as possible in one district with the Gerrymander. And unfortunately, the Congressional Black Caucus will work with them to create as many minority as majority districts in Ohio as they can create. They will put two Democrats together, or in this case with two seats being lost, four current Democratic members into two districts. I expect that Kucinich district will be split between Kaptur’s and Fudge’s current district, meaning that he would have to run against one them in a primary (and if its Fudge, he is a certain loser). They will also try to spread the remaining Democrats around so the current 13 Republican Districts all become safer (which is kind of remarkable in a 50/50 state).
El Cid
@rickstersherpa: No, I get it. That was the basis of my response. That’s why all the lines about how, yeah, what we did was wrong and horrible, but we can’t forget to focus just as much on how the hippies destroyed all the sexual mores we used to have, you know, like the way it’s pretty hip to be into pedophilia and child pornography these days. Which we know because there’s a lot of it.