ag
Atlas Icon
Posts: 12,828
|
 |
« on: August 13, 2007, 09:38:13 PM » |
|
Unless at the same time a constitutional ammendment is adopted giving the redistricting authority to an Independent Boundary Commission, this is an invitation to terrible mischief. Aside from everything else, imagine what would the California state legislature do to congressional boundaries in 2012: at that point incentives to gerrymander will by far exceed incentives to protect incumbents. I'd be shocked if, say, Orange County is not cut into multiple narrow threads all converging on LA (40% from OC, 60% from LA in each). And you'd have, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars going into a single State Senate race in NY if they did it there: at that point, getting rid of the remaining few Republican-leaning districts in the state becomes imperative for Dems, and that means that the single-party control of the state legislature is worth any amount of money. The end result of it all would, likely, be that not only a bunch of states are uncompetitive at presidential level, but that in Congress and in state legislatures most big states would look like Massachussetts or Idaho.
The appropriate remedy could be allocating electors by PR. There is simply no justification for doing it by congressional district.
|
