My better half raised her eyebrows over the GOP’s redistricting proposal thinking it grossly partisan. Of course, its always partisan. It just so happens that the GOP controls both houses of the Minnesota State Legislature. It is imperfect control, however, because Governor Dayton who can veto the plan is a DFLer.
Which brings me to the point of this post which is that whoever’s ox is gored will come up with silly reasons for why the plan is bad, unfair, irrational or imbecilic. Among these are the tried and tired rationales that the District doesn’t look like it used to or that it throws dissimilar people into the same geographic boundaries.
The US Constitution and its Amendments bend over backward to describe citizens as equals. The Supreme Court in 1954 affirmed this relative to voting by ruling that our reapportionments would be based on one man one vote and eliminated the ability to create Districts with vastly unequal population sizes. That left politicians with an even tougher challenge to carve out districts that would advantage one party over the other. Frankly the decision was better for Democrats who were more urban and who got a lot more Congressional Districts after the ruling.
In the past couple decades we have reverted to all sorts of gerrymandered districts which do have equal populations but often run as sinuously and Albert Gerry’s 19th Century Districts. So when I argue that the current Republican proposal looks rational (although there is no question it would be a boon to Republicans) I base that assertion on the relatively straight forward lines it has. In a year in which the Tea Party has been largely discredited and which President Obama has had some achievements who’s to say that Congressman Kline or Bachmann won’t find themselves in trouble. Chip Cravaak will get a safer district but he’s still an unknown quantity. (By the way a minute ago I got a call from his prerecorded voice inviting me to an instant tele-conversation. He began it by saying there was no good reason for us to accept high gas prices. Thanks Chip. And GOP elephants can fly.)
Among the more daft objections I’ve heard expressed for having our 8th District stretch from Morehead in the west to Duluth in the East is that it brings together such dissimilar people Farmers and folks in the mining industry…..you know laborers.
“We in the north have more connections with Pine County than with Marshall, Pennington or Clearwater, which are agricultural,â€
Who raised this objection? Noneother than Duluth’s Democratic Farmer Labor State Senator Roger Reinert. Maybe Rog is really a Democratic Labor representative.
