Have Americans Gerrymandered Ourselves?

On Tuesday, I attended the “Pancakes and Politics” breakfast hosted by the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. It was a lively and informative panel. One exchange that really struck me was a brief discussion of redistricting.

Everyone on the panel–Republican, Democrat and Statehouse reporter Ed Feigenbaum (who was officially neither)–agreed that noncompetitive elections are bad for democracy, that they pull parties to the extremes, encourage lazy legislators and reduce electoral participation.

The question was, what can be done about it?

The Democrat on the panel endorsed nonpartisan redistricting; the Republican on the panel (I should be better about names!) disagreed. He pointed out that Americans have been “sorting” ourselves into Red and Blue enclaves–voting with our feet to live in places where our neighbors agree with us about values and priorities. True enough–anyone who’s read Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort would recognize the accuracy of his observation.

His second argument against nonpartisan redistricting was less persuasive. Basically, he pooh-poohed the notion that we can really take partisan politics out of the process. The success of nonpartisan processes in Iowa and elsewhere suggest otherwise.

The truth–as is so often the case–is likely somewhere in the middle: eliminating partisan gamesmanship and gerrymandering will not solve the problem of underrepresentation of people living in overwhelmingly blue cities in red and purple states. But it would be measurably fairer than the current system, in which representatives choose their voters rather than the other way around, and that fairness would ameliorate at least some of the cynicism and apathy that depresses voter turnout. And it would increase the numbers of competitive districts–perhaps not as much as advocates hope, but certainly more than the panelist conceded.

Common Cause, which has made redistricting reform a high priority, has announced a contest that highlights one of the reasons that challenges to highly gerrymandered districts have failed: the Supreme Court has consistently declined to get involved unless the districts can be shown to have been drawn to disenfranchise minorities. The Court has said that partisan districts (districts drawn to unfairly benefit a political party) are “justiciable”–that is, that such challenges will be heard by the courts–but they have routinely declined to overturn political decision-making unless racially discriminatory motives can be demonstrated.

Common Cause has invited lawyers and political scientists to propose a new definition of partisan gerrymandering that might allow citizens to win such challenges, promising money prizes, publication of the winning paper and a trip to Washington, D.C.

It will be interesting to see what that contest produces.

Hope springs eternal…..

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Can We Spell “Short-Sighted and Stupid”?

In Indiana, we seem well along the way to achieving Grover Norquist’s wet dream of a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The IBJ recently reported:

The State Board of Accounts no longer is auditing the financial records of Indiana libraries, conservancy districts, some public school accounts, and small towns and townships, its leader says.

The agency doesn’t have enough money or staff to perform those audits, State Examiner Paul Joyce told The Herald Bulletin for a story Sunday. Instead, it will concentrate on local governments with bonding authority or federal grants worth at least $500,000.

“I only have so many people to do a job. It’s not that I don’t want to do them,” Joyce said of the audits. “I have places that have not been reviewed in five years.”

If the Indianapolis Star noticed this, I missed it.

So let’s see….we don’t have enough money in our “low tax” state to police units of government. Will we have enough money to prosecute the people who see this as an invitation to siphon off funds for their personal use? Will we have enough money to replace the funds that get “misplaced”?

Governor Pence has been praised by law-and-order Republicans for amassing a 2 Billion Dollar “surplus.” I can run a surplus at my house, too, if I just decide not to pay for mowing the yard or repairing the roof…..

This is pathetic.

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Hard To Argue

Sometimes, snark hits the nail on the head.

A couple of days ago, over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton made a snarky and audacious claim: After noting those aspects of Sharia Law that are most frequently criticized as being inconsistent with American values, he pointed out that today’s GOP holds those same beliefs:

  • Government is to be based upon religious doctrine
  • Women should have fewer rights than men
  • Homosexuality is to be outlawed
  • Religious doctrine trumps science
  • There is no separation of church and state
  • Religion is taught in government schools
  • Abortion should be illegal

All of these positions are proudly held both by extremist Muslims and the extremists who control  today’s Republican party.

Brayton’s conclusion: if you don’t want Sharia law, don’t vote Republican.

I hadn’t planned to share this–it seemed unnecessarily partisan–but Sunday evening I moderated a panel discussion sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The panel was hosted by Broadway United Methodist Church, and candidates for the Indiana legislature (both incumbents and challengers) were invited to participate. Five accepted: four Democrats and one Republican.

I was initially impressed that a Republican would be willing to defend the party’s current platform to a group that was unlikely to agree with much of it, but it immediately became clear that the Republican had not the foggiest notion what AU stood for, or for that matter, how church and state differ. Her answers to the questions were rambling, incoherent and  filled with personal anecdotes and biblical quotes. (Although she seemed totally unaware of the operation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, she did at one point offer the opinion that Jefferson “lied” in his letter to the Danbury Baptists.)

When a question was asked about recognition of same-sex marriage, she responded that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” (I kid you not.) She offered her support for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and merchants who refuse to provide services to gay customers, because “liberty,” and when asked whether those same merchants should also be able to refuse service to African-American patrons, she at first said she didn’t understand the question, but when pressed, said yes.

There was much, much more–including a closing statement in which she shared with the audience the information that God had asked her to run for office.

I know this woman is not representative of all Republican candidates. (As one appalled attendee noted afterward, she was a “stereotype on steroids.”) But the party was willing to have her run under its label. She somehow made it through slating.

In the course of the evening, she took every position on Brayton’s list (indeed, she went well beyond the list).

I’d be interested in knowing which of those positions today’s GOP–aka the American Taliban–would disown.

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Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

A friend from Wisconsin sometimes sends me clippings from his local papers that he thinks I will find interesting. The most recent was a perfect example of so much that’s wrong with our policymaking today: it told of a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who had been studying strains of the Ebola virus.

Just as his research was beginning to show promise–just as he and his team had created a potential vaccine– his funding was terminated. As the paper reported

The experiments demonstrated the vaccine, when administered in two doses, is effective even against the most deadly Ebola strains. That’s when the money ran out…Kawaoka could not proceed with tests to determine whether the vaccine regimen might work with humans.

I’m sure that those parceling out the ever-shrinking resources available for such studies figured Ebola was too abstract an issue–that scarce funds needed to be directed to research with more immediate application.

Whoops….

Researchers in all areas, including but certainly not limited to the sciences, have raised concerns over the dwindling of government resources for research and development. This lack of concern for investing in our continued progress, like our disinclination to maintain and improve our basic infrastructure, signals a country on the decline.

Who was it who said “The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit”? Whether that is the meaning of individual lives may be up for debate–but concern for the long term and the willingness to invest in it absolutely must be a central precept for any nation that wishes to be–or remain–great.

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The Socialists are Coming! The Socialists are Coming!

Okay–consider this my Sunday Sermon….

We know that America has an equality problem. We also have a language problem that makes issues of equality more difficult to discuss rationally.

Pundits across the political spectrum, the so-called “chattering classes,” increasingly use words as epithets, rather than as a way to describe reality. Terms like “liberal”—which used to mean “open minded,” “generous,” or a follower of the philosophy of John Locke—have become a content-free insult to be hurled at anyone favoring a marginally more activist government or slightly more robust social safety net.

When “liberal” gradually lost its sting, partisans moved on to “socialist.”

The problem is, few people using the term these days seem to know what socialism is, and even fewer recognize that socializing the solution to a problem can often be very good for capitalism (another system which few can define with any precision), by ameliorating more savage inequalities and thereby avoiding social instability.

The Affordable Care Act—aka “Obamacare”—is unremittingly attacked for being “socialism.” And it is absolutely true that it’s an effort to socialize access to health insurance. But what does “socialism” in this context really mean?

Rhetoric to the contrary, the ACA is hardly an unprecedented departure from a purely market-based system. (Prior to its passage, governments at all levels were paying nearly 70% of America’s healthcare costs, albeit through a grossly inefficient patchwork of programs.) More to the point, ours is a mixed economy, meaning that over the years policymakers have determined that some services are more appropriately or efficiently provided communally–“socialized” through units of government–while others are best left to the market.

We socialize police and fire protection. Most cities have socialized garbage collection. Federal and state highways and city streets are public goods provided by governments and paid for through (largely redistributive) taxes—that is, socialized. Add publicly-financed parks and museums and public schools. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security all offer “social insurance.” After some 100 years of policy debate, we have finally added health insurance to the list.

The ACA is far from perfect. Many Americans would prefer a single-payer system similar to those that operate in many European countries. Others fault the law’s complexity. Interest groups that stand to lose profits under the new accounting rules argue about the fairness of those provisions. Such complaints are to be expected when any major new program is introduced. Much as we saw with the evolution of Medicare, we can expect significant modifications going forward.

Policy debates are to be expected. What is much harder to understand is the level of hostility aroused by the suggestion that struggling Americans should be provided with access to affordable health insurance. Opponents of the ACA call it “socialized medicine” (it isn’t; at most, it is “socialized insurance”) as though the very label should be evidence that it is anti-American to use tax dollars to subsidize coverage for those who cannot afford it. People who live on their Social Security benefits and love their Medicare positively froth at the mouth at the notion that America has any obligation to extend the reach of such programs to less fortunate folks.

The irony here is that the very people who are fighting tooth and nail to bring down the ACA—bringing lawsuits, supporting candidates who vow to repeal it—are already among the Act’s beneficiaries. America’s previous non-system—the most expensive in the world by far—was widely acknowledged to be unsustainable. The cost of health insurance was a major impediment to job creation, and a drag on the whole economy. In the wake of the ACA’s passage, the indicators have all improved, benefitting all of us.

The ACA hasn’t just improved our economic health. It has also improved our moral health.

There is something very wrong with a society that rations healthcare on the basis of one’s ability to pay—a society willing to tell its most vulnerable members that they are expendable, that they do not deserve even the most basic medical care. Whatever we call this decision to even the playing field just a bit, to mend this major hole in the social safety net, it brings us closer to that elusive thing called civilization.

If that requires a bit of socialism, so be it.

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