Gerrymandering

GERRYMANDERING is as old a time honored tradition as its namesake, Mr. Gerry Mander. aka Eldridge Gerry, an eigtheenth century politician who oversaw the reshaping of redrawn congressional districts so that they resembled a salamander, contorted, twisted beyond recognition, to suit the needs of the party in power. The Commonwealth of Massachussets comes to mind, a raggedly shaped state where the voter manipulators can and often have run wild. In a great big sqaure state, like, say Wyoming or Arkansas, gerrymandering is much harder, if not imposible; the natural shape of congressional districts sticks out like a sore voter, small squares of territory begging for formal recognition. An area of land marked by invisible lines, arbitrarily, selectively to include the intended people and exclude the unwanted voters by lines wandering haphazardly all over god's green Earth without logic has been gerrymandered, count on it.. It aint the latest thang, to quote MIck Jagger. Like MIck, the corrupt practice is as popular as ever nowadays, always and eternally in style in our corrput American brand of plutocratic "democracy" which permits and even encouraes it. There are two possible strategies. Congressional districts can can either be redrawn to scatter the unwatned party's voters as far and wide as humanly possible to to diminish their strength, called "cracking", or so that as many of the opposition's voters are packed into a single district as possible, called "packing" to concentrate all their voting power in a single district, leaving all the others for the offeding party to prey on. Both major American political parties are guitly of it, asall major American political parties have either done it, tried to do it, or wanted to do it. Its simply much too tempting a trick not to try. And, best or worst of all, its perfectly legal, technically, because it can always be disguised and described as virtue and justified by citing selective fact based circumstances. In theory its illegal, in practice, quite legal. Get your party elected to power in your state, with a perfet trifecta of control of both legislative houses and the governorship, stay in power by rigging the voting districts. If left unchecked, gerrmandering can kill a democracy, or, if not that, can mortally wound one. It has yet to kill the great American pseudo democratic experiment, but has gravely wounded it, to the point where it is virtually impossible to defeat an incumbant member of the United States House of Representatives running for reelection, and nearly all of the four hundred and thirty eight districts across the country are essentially owned by one party or the other, lock, stock, and ballot box. The current focus of the corruption is Texas. the U.S. constitution requires redistricdting every ten years; Texas, in its zeal to establish even greater Republican control fo the rigged Republic of Texas, is jumping teh gun by five year, looking ahead to next year's election, when the Democrats seemed poised to take the House. What's alarming is that, like many other forms of criminal corruption popular in our era of Trump, the promoters of gerreymandering are making no attempt to hde their nefarious intent. Why bother? It doesn't have to be this way, although we the American people seem to passively prefer it this way. Every state in our nifgy fifty has the capacity to rdistrict fairly and honorably by using nonpartisan people to do the job A national unbiased system could be established through legislation. will anything be done?Unlikely,in the near future. As Jefferson said: "If the people become inattentive to the affairs of government, the legislators and magistrates shall divide the people nto two classes; wolves, and sheep." We the people have long since become inattentive. When we awaken, we wil likely do so sluggishly and belatedly, as always. In Texas, the Democrats have fled the state, to regroup and stall for time. That won't work, but at least its a step in the right direction.