GERRYMANDERING OUT? Citizens Retrieving Power From Lunatic Fringe

January 1, 2016
By: Dave Rogers

The people are finally getting a chance to speak...

...And, to take back control of their governments from the oligarchs and the lunatic fringe.

Get this, folks: gerrymandering appears on its way out.

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing the lines of political districts to favor the political party in power.

That leads to so-called "safe districts" and government by the lunatic fringe.

How is this possible, you ask?

When legislators fear primary challenges they tend to cave in to the "lunatics," the most extreme political elements in a party, political experts have concluded.

Thus government of, by and for the people goes by the wayside.

The tail wags the dog, as it were.

Now, all of a sudden, the worm is turning due to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an Arizona case last summer that upheld Arizona's citizen redistricting commission.

Other states with independent redistricting commissions include California, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Washington. Most of these commissions exclude lawmakers as a general rule, allowing them to aim at creating the fairest map possible.

Ohio voters approved a ballot measure earlier this year to reform the redistricting process in their state. The Supreme Court ruling in Arizona, and a recent similar ruling in Florida, signals a slow, agonizing death to the gerrymandering process.

Finally, voters have a chance to get their voices back and prevent politicians from monopolizing their seats and catering to their fringe elements because they come from safe, hyper-partisan districts.

Glory hallelujah! Now, how about Michigan?

The Arizona Legislature had brought suit in federal court, claiming the Constitution doesn't give citizens the right to control district boundaries.

In a 5-4 decision, but the Court sided with the independent commission, opening the door for other states to create their own independent commissions to combat the scourge of gerrymandering.

One political observer commented:

"Safe districts can cause two massive problems that seem contradictory: The first is to make legislators lazy, because they don't have to fear serious challenges from the opposition. However, it can also make them more extreme politically, because they fear primary challenges from their lunatic fringes. This is part of how the GOP's lunatic fringe, a.k.a. the Tea Party, took over. Republicans screwed themselves with their gerrymandering efforts, because they created hyper-partisan districts for themselves, some of which were way too far right. When you create entire districts for your lunatic fringe, your lunatic fringe takes over.

"Florida is a prime example of this, with more Democratic voters than Republican voters, but far more Republicans controlling the state."

Florida's new maps -- one for the House and one for the Senate -- will be drawn by the League of Women Voters of Florida and Common Cause Florida. These two groups spearheaded the four-year long war against the Republicans' own redistricting plans. The court rejected those plans as illegal under a voter-approved ban on gerrymandering.

State Sen. Joe Negron, of Stuart, seems to think that the Senate should cut its losses with this, although others are reviewing the judge's decision and seeing if there might be a way to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Negron thinks that the people of Florida will continue to elect 'principled' Republicans in spite of the new maps.