Brian W. Carver -- Share Alike

Congressional District Gerrymandering

You may have heard in the news over the last year about the big battle over re-drawing the Congressional districts in Texas. The Democrats fled the state to prevent a quorum, so that the Republicans couldn't force them to accept this bizarre re-districting map that guarantees more Republican seats next election. The Democrats in Texas eventually lost that battle.

You might not recall that the same thing happened in Pennsylvania, and now the crazy map there is being challenged in the Supreme Court. This New Yorker article details partisan gerrymandering like none I've ever read. Here's a particularly shocking excerpt:

A Democrat first elected to Congress in 1994, [Frank] Mascara represented a district in the rugged industrial country south of Pittsburgh. “My district had been more or less the same for about a hundred years,” Mascara told me on the porch of his house in Charleroi, which overlooks a glass-making plant on the banks of the Monongahela River. The son of a steelworker and the first member of his family to go to college, Mascara worked his way through county politics until he won his seat in the House. “A lot of people couldn’t believe that a congressman lived in a house like mine,” he said, noting its aluminum siding and probable resale value of about thirty-five thousand dollars. “But that’s the kind of guy I am,” he said. “I go to church down the street. I represent the average person.”

With the Republicans in charge in Harrisburg, Mascara knew he would be little more than a spectator to the redistricting process. “I still thought my district would for the most part remain intact,” he said. “That didn’t occur.” Mascara had met me at a McDonald’s in Charleroi’s ragged downtown, and then led me to his home on a quiet street called Lincoln Avenue, where we parked because he has no garage. From his porch, he pointed to our cars. “The cars are in the twelfth congressional district, and my house is in the eighteenth,” he explained. “When they drew the new lines, they started in Allegheny County, which is north of here, and made, like, a finger out of that district, and the finger went down the middle of the street where I live. The line came down to my house and stopped.” The Republicans’ meticulous line-drawing through Charleroi was designed to force Mascara into a primary battle with his fellow-Democrat John Murtha, which it did. Murtha defeated Mascara, ending his congressional career and reducing the Democratic presence in the House by one.

The story suggests how unpredictable the Supreme Court is on this issue. I really hope they mandate a non-partisan solution like Iowa now has, because this gerrymandering nonsense is a frightening attack on our Republic.

Posted by Brian at December 5, 2003 06:31 PM | TrackBack