By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday,
November 16, 2021
The Democrats invented gerrymandering —
the Republicans have come close to perfecting it.
Among the Founding Fathers, the name of
Elbridge Gerry does not exactly ring out. He was vice president under James
Madison and died in office. He was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party,
the forerunner of what we now call the Democratic Party. When Thaddeus Stevens
spits fire at the “modern
travesty of Thomas Jefferson’s political organization [that] has the effrontery
to call itself the Democratic Party,” he is referring to Gerry’s gang.
And what Gerry is mainly remembered for is
lending his surname to the word “gerrymander.” When Gerry was governor of
Massachusetts, the legislature drew up new state senate districts and did so in
a cynically partisan manner. The Boston Gazette, a Federalist
newspaper, published a cartoon in which one amphibian-shaped district was
christened the “Gerry-mander,” and the name stuck. Gerry, according to people
close to him, actually opposed the partisan redistricting, but was persuaded to
go along with it. Like Neville Chamberlain, a patriot and a capable statesman
who made one infamous error in judgment, his name and his reputation will be
forever linked to and blackened by a single distasteful episode.
When I was young and ignorant, I had the
same dumb opinion about gerrymandering as almost everybody else does: I was
shocked by it. The process was politicized, and I was scandalized. As a veteran
state legislator in Texas explained it to me, redistricting isn’t politicized —
it is political per se, “the most political thing a
legislature does,” as he put it. It does not have to be politicized because it
is political by nature, and to “depoliticize” it, as some self-serving
Democrats and a few callow idealists suggest, would be to change its nature and
its character. The Democrats who lecture us about the will of the people would,
in this matter, deprive the people’s elected representatives of one of their
natural powers.
The gerrymander — like the filibuster, the
earmark, the debt ceiling, and other procedural instruments of power — is
something that people complain about only when it is being used against them.
The Democrats were perfectly happy with gerrymandering for the better part of
200 years, understanding it to be an utterly normal part of the political
process. They began to object to it when Republicans got good at it. And, in a
refreshing bit of candor, their argument against partisan redistricting is
that Republicans are too good at it.
Seriously — that is the Democrats’
argument: that gerrymandering was all good and fine until Republicans figured
out how to make the most of it. Republicans, in clear violation of the ancient
Republican Party tradition, embraced cutting-edge technology and availed themselves
of the best experts’ help in order to methodically and intelligently conduct a
long-term program of serious and profitable political action. “Never before
have party strategists been armed with sophisticated computer software that can
help them carve districts down to the individual street and home,” Hedrick Smith wailed in a 2015 essay.
Detail-oriented Republicans with an
attention span exceeding that of a meth-addicted goldfish — angels and
ministers of grace, defend us!
This follows a familiar pattern for the
Democrats: They discover ways to maximize the political advantages that may be
had from applying pressure to sensitive procedural points — or invent new
political weapons outright — and then cry foul when Republicans figure out a
way to use the same tools, or even to improve on them. When the Democrats began
working to turn the Supreme Court confirmation process to their own advantage —
a campaign that has been characterized by vicious and often transparent lies
about Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and others — they did not
imagine that Republicans, dunderheaded as they are, would learn to play the
same game, or that such a coldblooded figure as Mitch McConnell would simply
drop a Supreme Court nominee into the nearest oubliette, as he did with Merrick
Garland. Democrats load left-wing priorities into “must-pass” legislation and
then complain when Republicans decline to be buffaloed by the parliamentary
maneuver, going as far as temporarily shutting down the federal government when
they deem it necessary.
Gerrymandering is the ur-case of this. Go
look at an old district map of Texas during that state’s 130 years of
Democratic legislative control, and what you will see is not exactly a
hard-edged display of Euclidean regularity. Democrats made the most of their
redistricting power in the Texas legislature and — bear this in mind,
Republicans — it wasn’t enough to save them. Not nearly enough. Once Texans
decided they were no longer buying what Democrats were selling, there was no
procedural shenanigan that was going to save the “modern travesty of Thomas
Jefferson’s political organization that has the effrontery to call
itself the Democratic Party.”
Sometimes, when an electorate swings, it
swings hard. Consider the history of Texas gubernatorial races. Unlike
legislative races, there are no districts for governors — the district is the
whole state. And though Texas Democrats were gerrymandering the hell out of the
state’s legislative districts, they also enjoyed a nearly unbroken run of power
in the governor’s office, which suggests that Democratic support in the state
was broad-based and reasonably deep rather than the result of
legislative-district manipulation. Excepting the two Republicans who served as
governors during Reconstruction, Texas went for all of the 19th century and
almost all of the 20th century without electing a Republican governor: Before
George W. Bush, only one Republican had held the office of governor since the
1870s. (Republican Bill Clements was elected to two separate terms with a
Democrat in the middle.) Greg Abbott is only the sixth Republican governor in
the whole of Texas’s history, including Reconstruction.
In those years, Texas was pretty solidly
Democratic in presidential elections, too, breaking Democratic ranks only
rarely (Hoover in 1928; Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956; and Nixon’s reelection in
1972, after having backed Hubert Humphrey over the Republican in 1968) before
settling firmly on the GOP from 1980 onward.
No Democrat has even come close to winning
the governorship since Bush defeated the charismatic and cartoonish Ann
Richards. Wendy Davis, the last great Democratic hope in Texas, didn’t even
break 40 percent in her 2014 race against Abbott. Likewise, no Democratic
presidential candidate has come close to winning Texas since Ronald Reagan put
his long-lasting stamp on American politics in 1980. Bill Clinton, riding high
in 1996, got trounced by Bob Dole; neither Al Gore nor John Kerry broke 40
percent in their respective races against Bush; both Mitt Romney and John
McCain easily bested Barack Obama. But Republicans ought to be watching the
count: Joe Biden did better in Texas than has any Democratic presidential
contender since Jimmy Carter, who beat Gerald Ford 51 percent to 48 percent for
Texas’s electoral votes in 1976. And Robert Francis O’Rourke, hero of a million
bumper-stickers, came closer than Republicans would like to taking out Ted
Cruz.
No amount of artful pie-slicing is going
to turn a blueberry pie into a cherry pie.
A party can get a lot of juice out of
procedural maximalism — gerrymandering, taking frequent recourse to the
filibuster, standing in legislative bottlenecks and grandstanding at
confirmations. But if that were enough to keep a party in power, then Texas
would be a Democratic state. It isn’t. The Democrats must have felt at one time
as though Texas were their citadel — back around the same time that California
was a nursery of Republican presidents. Things change. In politics as in many
other things, all victories are temporary, as are all defeats: This, too, shall
pass.
The New York Times has
this headline on its front page today: “Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in
2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge: On a highly distorted congressional map that
is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to
capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.” I don’t
doubt the accuracy of the psephological analysis, but the Democrats’ real
problem right now isn’t Republican cleverness in map-making.
It is high levels of inflation, high
levels of crime, and high levels of Kamala Harris.
It is also the residue of Barack Obama.
Perhaps because he believed his own messianic press clippings, Barack Obama
turned out to be the greatest leader Republicans ever had in their quest to
control state legislatures and governorships. During Obama’s presidency,
Democrats gave up twelve governorships and nearly 1,000 seats in state
legislatures, along with 62 U.S. House seats and 11 senators — “a
mind-bogglingly large number of races across the country,” as Vox put
it. That created a great many opportunities for Republican gerrymandering. But,
in spite of Republican manipulation of House districts, the Democrats quickly
rebuilt their congressional majorities with the assistance of Donald Trump.
They have found it harder going in state legislatures and now face strong
headwinds in congressional races, too. It seems likely that this situation will
persist for some time.
Why?
High levels of inflation, high levels of
crime, and high levels of Kamala Harris.
Legislatures draw up legislative
districts. If you don’t like the way your legislature does its work, then take
Barack Obama’s advice and try winning an election.
In Other News . . .
Over the weekend, NPR ran a long story on
union-organizing campaigns. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with Michel
Martin’s report, but the questions all came from the same direction; i.e., what
will it take for union-organizing drives to be “successful”? There were many
questions that Martin might have asked that she didn’t. For example, only one
in ten Americans belongs to a labor union, and those are overwhelmingly
concentrated in the public sector. Why? Why do so many Americans — from Amazon
workers to autoworkers in the “transplant” facilities — actively reject labor
unions? What good reasons do employers have for preferring not to do business
with unions? What role has union corruption played in the rejection of unions
by workers and employers alike?
At NPR, it apparently never even occurs to
anybody to ask what downsides there are to unionization, what tradeoffs might
come into play, etc.
When we talk about media bias, that’s what
we are talking about.
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