Rolly: Blowing Democrats off the map
Sunday, January 14, 2007(Salt Lake Tribune)
Salt Lake Tribune
He blamed both parties. Where Democrats have control of state legislatures, they draw congressional boundaries that create safe seats for Democrats. Ditto for states where Republicans have control.
By doing so, he said, few congressional races are really in play. The rest are rigged to ensure victory for the party in control. That leaves no incentive to compromise or entertain the opposition party's argument.
The incentive is to play to the party base because the lines were drawn to make the party base the majority. And that, in turn, makes the moderates of both parties vulnerable, because the more entrenched in one party ideology a congressional district becomes, the more dangerous it becomes politically for a representative to veer toward the center rather than stay entrenched in the left, or in the right.
Watching the interview and listening to Obama's words, I saw some disturbing parallels to what he was saying about Congress and what the political situation is in Utah.
The argument can be made that the Utah Legislature is far more conservative on several key issues than the Utah population. The Legislature has passed measures that were clearly opposed by the majority of Utah's population. And it has defeated or ignored proposals clearly favored by the majority.
The Legislature is made up of 55 Republicans and 20 Democrats in the House and the Senate is composed of 21 Republicans and eight Democrats. That equates to a 73 percent Republican majority in the House and a 72 percent Republican majority in the Senate. And that translates to virtually zero clout the Democrats wield in the Legislature.
Anything they do can easily be squashed by the super-Republican majority. And Democrats complain constantly that they routinely are left completely out of the decision-making process when important policy measures are put in place.
But if you look at voting patterns statewide, Democrats get about 43 percent of the vote. So if the Legislature reflected the political makeup of the public it serves, there would be 32 Democrats to 43 Republicans in the House and 12 Democrats to 17 Republicans in the Senate.
The Republicans would still have the majority and would still set the agenda in the Legislature. But the Democrats, with those numbers, would at least have enough votes to force some meaningful dialogue and debate where there now is very little.
You can chalk up much of that discrepancy to gerrymandering.
Every 10 years the Legislature draws new legislative and congressional boundaries to reflect the latest population figures from the decade-ending U.S. Census. The Republicans in Utah have had significant majorities to draw the boundaries to their best advantage for the past three decades.
And each time, it seems to get more blatantly partisan.
Take the latest redistricting map, drawn in 2000, for example.
The Democrats seemed to be making some inroads, although they still had hopeless minorities in 2001. The new districts that were drawn, however, resulted in an automatic loss of several Democratic seats before the public even had a chance to vote.
The Republican-dominated Redistricting Committee combined the Senate seats of Democrats Ron Allen and Millie Peterson into one district, forcing the two Democratic incumbents into a convention fight for that one seat. When then-Senate President Al Mansell, while at the Republican State Convention in 2002, learned that Peterson had lost at the Democratic convention, he pumped his fist in triumph. That seemed to put an exclamation point to the idea of majority arrogance.
The committee that year also took Democratic incumbent Sen. Ed Allen's Ogden district and combined it with parts of conservative Davis County, ensuring Allen would not retain his seat. It combined the districts of then-Democratic Reps. Patrice Arent and Pat Jones into one district, eliminating a Democratic House seat.
It took several other urban districts and combined them with rural areas, automatically making them more conservative and all but assuring a Republican victory.
The result is that measures get passed that the people oppose.
The Legislature requires public universities and colleges to allow concealed-weapons permit holders to carry their guns on campus, even though polls have consistently shown the public does not want guns on campus. The Legislature has given less money to public education over the years than the public would like it to have, according to several polls.
And the Legislature is inching closer and closer to passing tuition tax credits for private school enrollment, even though polls have shown that to be the least-attractive of possible education-reform initiatives.