Idiocy Presented as Knowledge

On the Daily Beast site, there is a column written by Hedrick Smith in which he laments the "unfair" redistricting that has given the Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives. Smith points out that Democrats got more votes for Congress while Republicans won more seats. This is Smith's proof of gerrymandering. For example Smith cites this factoid: "In Pennsylvania, Democratic House candidates outpolled Republicans by 2.7 million to 2.6 million votes, but the Republicans got 13 House seats to just five for Democrats."

The truth is that Smith just does not know what he is talking about. The districts for Congress are the result of that most liberal and Democrat of statutes, the Voting Rights Act. That act, passed in 1965, required states to set up districts so as to promote minority representation. In other words, districts have to be set up to contain a majority of minorities where possible. The net result of this statute is that groups like African Americans who vote overwhelmingly Democrat get crammed together into single districts rather than spread across multiple districts with the result that there is a black Congressman elected. The other districts, however, necessarily become more white and thereby more Republican. Let's look again at Pennsylvania under this paradigm. There are three districts out of 18 that contain part of the city of Philadelphia, the location of the greatest concentration of both minorities and Democrats in the state. The margin for the three Democrats in these districts over their Republican opponents was about 560,000 votes. That means that in the other 15 districts, the GOP margin was about 460,000 and the Republicans won 13 of 15. Even were the Voting Rights Act not involved, there would still be at most 3 seats covering Philadelphia. Indeed, based upon population, Philadelphia merits about 2.2 seats in Congress. The concentration of Democrats/blacks in that city is not the result of gerrymandering; rather, the results reflect the locations where folks live. Remember that for two centuries prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, congressional districts were set up to keep regions together. The ideal was a state with compact districts. Under that type of plan, the results in Pennsylvania would not have been any different than they actually were.

Now it is true that for the first time in modern history, the Republicans were in control of more redistricting than the Democrats and by a large margin. That is because Republican control of state governments is at the highest level since the 1920's. Without a doubt, there must be seats that were designed to benefit Republicans, but this is nothing except the reversal of nearly a century of seats designed to benefit Democrats. Why else does one think that the Democrats held control of Congress from 1954 to 1994. When Nixon swept in 1972, the Democrats held the Congress comfortably. When Reagan swept 49 states in 1984, the GOP won the Senate, but it could not take the House. Further, one cannot forget Illinois where the Democrats actually did gerrymander districts to oust Republicans. Somehow, the liberals do not like it when the Republicans simply do what the Democrats have done for decades.