Creatures concocted to protect power
A gerrymander’s sole purpose is to assure that one party dominates, voters’ wishes be damned.
Consider the salamander, a fascinating little amphibian that resembles a cross between a frog and a lizard. With slender, smooth-skinned bodies, stubby snouts and long tails, most species of salamanders live underground in caves and aquifers. Most are about six inches long (except for the 6-foot-long Japanese giant salamander). They’re harmless, except for a gland on their neck that emits a foultasting, occasionally poisonous liquid when would-be predators presume to take a bite.
More than 600 species of salamander inhabit the earth, not including the species most often spotted in Texas — that is, the lab-created, predatory mutant called the gerrymander. Concocted by power-mad political scientists in thrall to the party in control of state government, the invasive species is designed solely to assure that the party in power — either Republican or Democrat — stays in power, the wishes of the voter be damned. Like the salamander, the gerrymander resists the light of day.
Gerrymanders appear every 10 years, in response to the release of U.S. Census population figures determining the number of congressional districts available to each state. A small — and, no doubt, grotesque — herd is in gestation at this very moment as the Texas Legislature turns to its task of rearranging boundaries for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Texas Legislature and the State Board of Education. With Texas gaining two congressional seats as a result of population gains recorded by the 2020 Census, the gerrymander will be in the news regularly during the next few months. And rightly so.
The census reflects a reality we’ve been living with for at least the past decade. The center of gravity for a nation long dominated by the Northeast and the Midwest has shifted southward, to Texas and other Sunbelt states.
It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that as Texas goes, so goes the nation. A larger Texas
congressional delegation means not only more seats at the federal table, and more money, but also an opportunity to show representative democracy at work. Demographically, Texas has changed drastically during the past decade as the state heads toward majority-minority status. Redistricting is supposed to reflect those changes.
That’s where the creature called the gerrymander comes into play. Unlike its namesake, the gerrymander is a shapeshifter, depending on the needs of the party empowered to do the drawing of district lines on a map. A gerrymander might have a slender body, stubby snout and long tail as it curves around neighborhoods and cuts through counties, or it might rely on freakishly long legs, a bobbed tail and a bulbous body to encompass the areas where the desired voters live. For a particularly hideous example, look at the 2nd Congressional District, held by Dan Crenshaw, a Houston Republican. With its spadeshaped
head, attenuated trunk and crooked tail, the 2nd District gerrymander resembles a monster from a ’50s-era Japanese horror movie.
Salamanders have managed to survive for eons; gerrymanders are almost as hardy and adaptable. Lawmakers who rely on their utility zealously guard their well-being. The U.S. Supreme Court handles them as delicately as an endangered species, despite the bad taste — indeed, the poison — they transmit to the body politic. Although racist gerrymandering is still illegal — sorry, Texas! — the high court in June upheld the practice of gerrymandering by one party for the sole purpose of protecting its partisan hegemony.
It’s not just the gerrymander’s torturous curvature that’s offensive. In a democracy, the people are charged with electing their representatives. Our unnatural reliance on gerrymanders gets it backward: Representatives get to choose their people, their voters. Relying on increasingly
sophisticated technology to tailor-shape their gerrymanders, members of the majority party stretching district appendages with God-like precision to create the right amalogomation of voters to increase the likelihood of Republican victory. The true aim of redistricting — ensuring that everyone is fairly represented — gives way to a partisan scheme to enhance the political power of one group often at the expense of another.
Gerrymanders have been useful little creatures since they were first concocted in 1812 to protect the power of Massachusetts Gov. Eldridge Gerry’s Democrat-Republican Party. Thanks to the gerrymander, a portmanteau word created by a poet named Richard Alsop, Gerry’s party won more state senate seats, even though the Federalist opposition garnered more votes statewide.
Texas lawmakers, regardless of party, have been enthusiastic gerrymanderers for decades. Voters would have to pry lawmakers’ district-drawing power from their cold, dead hands, but some states have done just that. They have established nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw boundaries that reflect population changes and election fairness, not partisan power. In years past, former state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, a San Antonio Republican, tried for years to persuade his fellow lawmakers to establish a redistricting commission for Texas. He got nowhere. A similar state-level effort would be even more quixotic today.
We must look to Washington, where House Democrats last month passed House Resolution 1, comprehensive votingreform legislation that would require each state to use independent commissions, not self-interested lawmakers, to approve newly drawn districts. The commission would include five Republicans, five Democrats and five independents. Lawmakers would be ineligible to serve. The legislation’s chances in the Senate are 50-50, literally.
Even if President Joe Biden has the opportunity to sign HR 1 into law, a redistricting commission would not do its work for another decade. What Texans can do now is pay attention to the process. House Bill 3112, the Texas Redistricting Transparency Act, would establish requirements for transparency, public information and public involvement. In a state with a regrettable history of ignoring minority voting rights and fairly apportioned districts — Texas has violated the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle since 1970 with racially gerrymandered districts — these basic rules, spelled out, are necessary.
Someday, perhaps, the gerrymander will meet its welldeserved fate: Extinction. Meanwhile, Texas voters must insist that lawmakers do their work in the open. Salamanders can hide in the depths of darkness, but representatives of the people can’t. Their carefully concocted, grotesquely shaped gerrymanders must be hauled to the surface, into the bright light of day.