Here is a link to the transcript of a Bill Moyers interview with law professor and tweeter Richard Painter, whom I mentioned here. My favorite exchange:
Moyers: Did you see that Arizona's legislature, controlled by the Republicans, voted to dismantle the state's strict campaign finance disclosure laws?
Painter: [O]ne of the things that I’ve seen over many years of looking at what’s happened in different states is, when you have a political system where one party in a particular location feels they’ve got control and they can do anything they want, the corruption problem is even worse. Down in Arizona, the Republican Party’s felt very secure in their position that voters won’t bail on them regardless of what they do. So this is going to create a situation where it’s even more tempting to run to the special interests, and if the special interests don’t want disclosure then we won’t have any disclosure; because who’s going to squawk about it? And that’s not a good situation. Voters need to make it very clear, they’re going to vote for other primary challengers to these people, or they’re going to vote for a Democrat, or whatever it takes, but this system has to get fixed in Arizona and everywhere else.
Painter is surely correct about the general principle, which helps explain such diverse phenomena as corruption in big city politics (no danger of voters throwing out the Democrats) and Alabama's "luv guv" (no danger of voters punishing the Republicans). What he doesn't mention is that, with respect to the House of Representatives, the maps are drawn with the express intent of creating uncompetitive districts. Republicans, for example, want to cram all the Democrats in a metro area into as few districts as possible, in order that they might win as many seats as possible across the entire region.
The above maps are all crimes against geography working overtime as congressional districts. Consider the relatively mild case represented by the bottom-center map. It was drawn by Republican state legislators in North Carolina and is a rather obvious attempt to create an overwhelmingly Democratic district in the Research Triangle area, so that Republicans might prevail in the surrounding territories. You wouldn't want to have all those Democrats distributed evenly across multiple districts. There would be competitive races that the Republicans might lose!
Alas, sifting out Democrats tends to involve sifting out African Americans, and the district did not survive a court challenge claiming it was unconstitutionally gerrymandered along racial lines. Turns out it's easier to sift out Democrats who do yoga and have a $12-per-day Starbucks habit.
But, however you do it, the effect, if you can get away with it (and you usually can), is not only artificially high representation in the Congress but also, by "the Painter principle," more corruption and special interest influence. Might a remedy be at hand? Here's hoping the case succeeds.
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