'Dismantling Democracy' to save it: How Democrats rediscovered the joys of rigging elections - Jonathan Turley

[Geee]

The Hill

"Voters should choose their representatives — not the other way around." With those words late Friday night, President Biden celebrated a decision by North Carolina’s supreme court rejecting new state legislative districts that favored Republicans. The ruling was used to support Biden's past portrayals of Republicans as the enemies of democracy, including their use of gerrymandering. 

Biden is not alone. Former President Obama condemned Republican gerrymandering efforts as threatening democracy. The liberal Brennan Center has declared that "gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic." Liberal commentators insist the choice is simple: "It’s restricting gerrymandering or being complicit in the dismantling of democracy.”

Biden was careful to keep his focus on North Carolina in stating that "for too long, partisan gerrymandering has allowed politicians to rig the political process and draw districts in their favor." Indeed, it required an impressive act of myopia to avoid noting that Democrats have engaged in raw gerrymandering in various states, too. But the North Carolina decision could seriously undermine Democratic plans in other states to rig elections and gain seats in Congress.

 

For example, in New York Democrats want to add four new seats through gerrymandering, to try to retain control of the U.S. House. One district is designed to guarantee the reelection of Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has held hearings on the evil of  — you guessed it  — gerrymandering. 

Gerrymandering is to politics what doping is to sports. It is universally viewed as a cheat, an effort to manipulate districts to guarantee electoral victories. Drafting coherent districts evenly and logically to divide populations is not particularly difficult. School districts usually are designed to evenly distribute populations with schools as center points; those school districts often serve as voting locations. Once you depart from such logical divisions, however, political pressures produce a grotesque progeny of malformed districts.

[Valin]

@Geee

Rediscovered...Rediscovered? That would presuppose that at some time they forgot/lost how to do it. BTW the GOP Does it to.

Quote

Gerrymandering is to politics what doping is to sports. It is universally viewed as a cheat, an effort to manipulate districts to guarantee electoral victories.

Something I have noticed over the decades, gerrymandering is bad only when the other Party gets an advantage.