Geography is Destiny,
People's Congress?
excerpted from the book
Fixing Elections
The Failure of America's
Winner Take All Politics
by Steven Hill
Routledge Press, 2002, hardcover
p4
Despite a relatively weak record by the Clinton-Gore administration
on civil rights, affirmative action, racial profiling, sentencing
disparities between crack and powder cocaine offenses, and welfare
reform, an astonishing 90 percent of African Americans voted for
Gore, as did 62 percent of Latinos and 55 percent of Asians (95
percent of blacks and over 60 percent of Latinos voted against
Bush in his home state of Texas, a stunning rejection of the Texas
governor's symbolic racial overtures and self-proclaimed "compassionate
conservatism") Combined, people of color accounted for an
unprecedented 30 percent of Gore's total vote, and nearly 20 percent
of all voters.
On the other hand, whites constituted
almost 95 percent of Bush's total vote, with white men in particular
preferring Bush, as did 80 percent of the white religious right.
More revealing, while women overall voted 54-43 for Gore, white
women actually favored Bush by one point, 49-48. Women of color
created the gender gap. The same can be said of the poor: while
57 percent of voters with incomes under $15,000 voted for Gore,
poor whites broke slightly for Bush.
p5
The national fractures and fault lines revealed by UnElection
2000, then, were geographic, particularly city versus rural; they
were regional, with the old Confederate South and the rural and
Mountain West opposing the old Union states of the North and Northeast
plus the West Coast, with New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire,
and the Midwest as tossups; they were heavily racial, with voting
patterns starkly polarized along racial lines approaching that
of South Africa's in its first post-apartheid elections ...
p5
Suburbanites ... tend to be a little more Republican than Democrat,
and the candidate that wins this group tends to win the election.
In the 2000 presidential election they split 50-50, with the suburbs
casting well over 40 percent of the total vote. Fifty years ago,
fewer than a quarter of Americans lived in the suburbs, now roughly
half do; every ten years another ten members of Congress represent
predominantly suburban districts.
p12
The 2000 U.S. Census reports that the Latino population, now 35.3
million nationwide, rose 58 percent over the past decade and now
surpasses that of African Americans.
p12
... over a third of Asians live in California and New York, large
communities now can be found in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota,
and several other states.
p12
All told, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population under age 18
is Hispanic, Asian, black, or another minority; minorities account
for more than half of the non-adult population in five states-Arizona,
California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii.
p16
... culturally and racially conservative white voters ... still
comprise the bulk of the American voters.
p56
Attack politics have become the modus operandi throughout our
two-choice political system. Not only are campaigns relentlessly
negative and invasive, but today attacks and wedge issue politicking
continue throughout the governing process. What the Clinton impeachment
debacle illustrated, as much as anything, is that two-choice,
Winner Take All politics has degenerated into a type of gaming
and manipulation for partisan advantage that has brought us the
specter of the permanent negative campaign. Yet, despite all the
national disgust and media attention over negative politicking,
there has been surprisingly little discussion by pundits and political
scientists about how the two-choice, Winner Take All system substantially
drives attack-style tactics. In fact, it is malignantly suited
for it.
Besides providing powerful incentives
for attack-style campaigning and political gaming, the Two-Choice
Tango also deprives voters of political choices, whether a range
of political parties and candidates or a range of viewpoints and
policy preferences. Despite a recent clamor by voters for more
political choices, as evidenced by the successes of independent
candidates like Ross Perot, Lowell Weicker (former governor of
Connecticut), Angus King (governor of Maine) and Jesse Ventura,
third parties have been notoriously unsuccessful in our Winner
Take All system. Out of the more than 7,000 state senate and house
seats scattered across the United States, five currently are held
by third parties, all in Vermont (a fairly constant number, year
after year, election after election). Out of 535 Congressional
and U.S. Senate seats, only two are held by an independent representative
(one each from Vermont and Virginia), and none by third parties.
It has always been that way in the United States (and to some
degree other Winner Take All democracies as well, such as the
aforementioned Great Britain). Out of the approximately 21,000
U. S. House races in the twentieth century, minor party and independent
candidates won a mere one hundred times, plus another seven special
elections, a total of 107 victories-or about 0.5 percent of the
time. That the rate of third party success is as likely explained
as a statistical fluke as much as any organic political momentum
or alteration of the duopolistic landscape.
There have been over one thousand third
parties in our nation's history, but only one has ever lasted-the
Republican Party, which replaced in the 1850s one of the two major
parties that had been riven apart over the issue of slavery. Most
third parties are only a distant memory now, for trivia junkies
and TV game shows, but with a small but determined few still buzzing
around the American political landscape against all odds. Third
parties lose under Winner Take All not because they don't have
good ideas or enough campaign resources but because they are a
minority perspective competing in a majoritarian Winner Take All
system that rewards the highest vote-getters, which, by definition,
is not usually a minority. The prospect of wasting your vote on
a third-party candidate who doesn't stand a chance or, even worse,
voting for a third-party candidate like Ralph Nader who might
spoil your "lesser of two evils" candidate and help
elect your "greater evil," are powerful disincentives
that have always knocked the legs out from under third parties.
The fact is, Winner Take All systems are
notoriously hostile to the success and survival of third parties.
Consequently, voters have fewer meaningful choices at the polls.
Fewer viewpoints and policy options get debated during the campaigns,
as the Two-Choice Tango "dumbs down" the quality of
campaign debates by using extreme negative campaigning and by
preselecting a narrow range of issues for political debate that
will appeal to a narrow pool of swing voters in swing districts
or swing states. It was telling during the 2000 presidential campaign,
which was dominated by a handful of issues, including Medicare,
Social Security, and prescription drug benefits for seniors, when
one twenty-something commented, "I feel like if you aren't
elderly or on Medicare or Social Security, these two candidates
have nothing to say to you." As a result of the Two-Choice
Tango and the use of the modern campaign technologies, most other
policies and issues-and the constituencies interested in them-got
left on the sidelines during the campaign.
p68
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, ten children
and adolescents in the United States are killed each and every
day by gunfire-nearly 4,000 per year, 86 percent of the firearm
deaths for children in the entire world-a level of horror usually
expected in death-squad dictatorships like El Salvador or Pinochet's
Chile, or in the Taliban's Afghanistan.
p69
The General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, has
released a report claiming the U.S. military was selling old clips
of .50 caliber armor-piercing bullets to a private contractor,
who then refurbished the clips and sold them to private gun dealers
all over the country. More than 100,000 rounds of ammunition designed
to pierce tanks, bring down helicopters, and slice through buildings
were refurbished and sold by Talon Manufacturing in 1998. The
report showed that these shells and the weapons that fire them-
long-range sniper weapons-can easily be purchased in gun shops
and over the Internet. Indeed, there are fewer legal hurdles to
buying sniper weapons than to buying a regular handgun. And while
a person has to be eighteen or older to get t his weapon from
a licensed dealer-or sixteen to drive an automobile, eighteen
to vote, or twenty-one to consume alcohol-there's no penalty whatsoever
under federal law and most states' laws for a person who resells
their gun secondhand to a kid of any age. The military also auctions
off broken semiautomatic weapons to gun dealers and gunsmiths
who then put them back together with replacement parts and sell
them. M-1 carbines and M-1 Garands can be purchased easily by
the average person on the street, who is free to resell them to
kids or to people with criminal records. Eric Harris, one of the
teenage Littleton assailants, obtained his TEC-DC9 semiautomatic
handgun from a friend of a coworker who was over twenty-one, perfectly
legal under federal law (although a crime under Colorado law,
which was later used to convict the supplier of the Columbine
firearms).
No, reviewing our hodgepodge of firearms
laws, one would conclude that we are a devout, even fundamentalist,
Second Amendment society, with private individuals armed to levels
exceeded only by countries like Milosevic's Serbia or the Taliban
in Afghanistan. And we have a sorely unresponsive Winner Take
All Congress to thank for it. Like our voting machine debacle,
our gun-slinging culture has made the United States the butt of
jokes around the world. Instead of taking away the guns, our children
have to deal with the concentration camp-like specter of metal
detector gates at school entrances, video cameras panning the
hallways, and flash searches and seizures like a village under
siege by an occupying army. Walking into some urban schools today
one is reminded of the heavily surveiled "model villages"
in Guatemala during the worst years of its murderous regimes,
no doubt an intimidating and thuggish atmosphere for an education.
p75
What if the President of the United States were to go on television
and announce to the nation that, starting tomorrow, the United
States is switching to a new democracy technology and the results
of this change will be the following:
* less than half, often only one-third,
of eligible voters will participate in national elections;
* even fewer voters will participate in state and local elections;
* barely a third, often one-quarter, of all voters will cast a
vote for a winning candidate;
* about three-quarters of U.S. House races regularly will be won
by landslides (at least a 60 to 40 percent margin), and a full
90 percent of House races will be won by noncompetitive ten-point
margins (at least 55 to 45 percent);
* state legislative races will be even less competitive than U.S.
House races, t with a whopping 40 percent of state legislative
races typically uncontested by one of the two major parties;
* despite being primarily a two-party system, about 90 percent
of voters will have only one choice of a candidate that has any
chance of winning their district seat;
* at least 95 percent of incumbents will be reelected on a regular
basis.
If the president announced these to be
the results we could expect from this change in democracy technology,
how do you think the nation might react? Or imagine if the CEOs
of Microsoft or Cisco or any other Fortune 500 corporation announced
organizational changes that would produce similar impacts on their
bottom line-how do you think their stockholders and boards of
directors might react? Most likely there would be an outcry. Yet
this profile is exactly the prevailing snapshot of U.S. representative
democracy using our antiquated ~ ~ Winner Take All methods and
practices.
p75
Even during America's most important election for President, 100
million voters sat it out. Another 30 million are no-shows during
nonpresidential election years.
p78
... following the 2000 Census, every legislative district in the
United States-every city council district, every state legislative
and U.S. House district-literally thousands and thousands of districts-automatically
expired. By law these geographic districts must all be roughly
equal in population, and so the decennial population and demographic
shifts reflected by the new Census triggered the expiration of
the existing districts. This means that every legislative district
had to be redrawn before the next elections in 2002. This linedrawing
occurs at the start of every decade, as certain as income taxes
and death.
This line-drawing, in many respects, is
the defining skirmish of the Winner Take All geographic-based
system. Newt Gingrich once said "Redistricting is everything."
That's because the impact of this line-drawing is to decide-in
advance-the winners and losers of most legislative elections for
the next ten years. And guess who is redrawing the lines? Is it
panels of fair-minded citizens, making sure that the political
and geographic boundaries of their neighborhoods are kept intact?
Is it political scientists, armed with reams of data and computer
tools to ensure that competition is maximized and that no single
political party walks off with the prize? Is it learned judges
or independent nonpartisan commissions, deliberating over objective
and impartial criteria about what constitutes a fair redistricting?
Will the process include public input of those whose votes and
trust in government will be most affected?
The answer, in a word, is no.
In fact, contrary to all sense-except
the type of sense that has been steeped in the defenses of the
status quo-the lines [of legislative districts] are redrawn by
none other than the politicians themselves. And these incumbent
line-drawers generally are guided by no criteria other than two
rather ambitious and self-serving goals: first, to guarantee their
own reelection and that of their friends and colleagues; and second,
to garner a majority of legislative seats for their political
party or faction. When it comes to redistricting, the fox not
only guards the hen house, the fox salivates.
p79
Forget what you've heard about Big Money buying elections-redistricting
Winner Take All districts is the political class' slickest sleight
of hand, and it descends upon us once a decade like a giant iceberg.
Behind closed doors, incumbent politicians, their political parties,
and their consultants conduct the decennial ritual of carving
up their personal fiefdom, their legislative district. Collectively
they jigsaw, jury-rig, and gerrymander their districts down to
the neighborhood bloc level. They produce legislative districts
whose shapes resemble, in the words of many observers, splattered
spaghetti sauce, a squashed mosquito, meandering snakes, dumbbells,
earmuffs, starfish, a gnawed wishbone, Bullwinkle the Moose, the
"Z" mark of Zorro, and a host of other bewildering shapes
that defy description or explanation other than the capricious
acts of a powerful class of politicians looking to guarantee themselves
lifetime employment and party preeminence.
p83
Research has shown that, as a result of Winner Take All and its
redistricting roulette-not inequities in campaign finances-the
vast majority of U.S. House races are so noncompetitive as to
be done deals before voters even show up to the polls. To be precise,
in the 2000 House elections 91 percent of races were won by comfortable
victory margins greater than ten points, and 78 percent were won
by landslide margins greater than twenty points (both of these
figures include the sixty-five races that were uncontested by
a major party). Only thirty-eight seats-less than 9 percent of
all House seats-were won by competitive margins of fewer than
ten points, the lowest figure in twelve years and second lowest
in the past twenty. Like a Soviet-type Politburo, nearly 99 percent
of incumbents won reelection, and most legislative elections were
reduced to a meaningless charade.
p108
The monopoly politics of Winner Take All also undermines campaign
finance reform. New research is showing that most election results
now correlate more closely with whether the gerrymandered districts
lean Democrat or Republican than with inequities in campaign finance.
p109
The simple truth is that, in this new era of computer-driven,
precisely gerrymandered districts, campaign contributors will
respond to high incumbent re-election rates more than cause them.
Donors will give to candidates they know will win because the
district has been drawn to produce that result. Besides returning
incumbents to office like the sea returns flotsam to the shore,
gerrymandering trumps the impact of private money on most legislative
elections, hands-down. It is this fact that has allowed the Center
for Voting and Democracy to predict the winners in most legislative
races eighteen months before the election, without knowing anything
about inequities in campaign finance, primarily by correlating
the partisan nature of how the districts had been drawn during
the i991-92 redistricting process. Using their partisan demographic
method of analysis, the Center's executive director Rob Richie
confidently predicted in the early '90s, earlier than any other
pundit or politico, "The Democrats' edge in House races in
the post-New Deal era is over." And he was exactly right.
Handicappers at the horse track should be so lucky as to have
races as predictable as these.
This is a sea-level change of dramatic
proportions, yet hardly anyone is talking about it. Certainly
you would never know it by listening to the hype of many national
pundits and reformers, still operating under the assumptions of
the old paradigm. We still see countless headlines blaring "Money
Buys Elections," and reports of the latest record-breaking
campaign fundraising figures. For example, following the November
2000 elections, a press release from the Center for Responsive
Politics, a leading campaign finance reform think tank, boldly
announced: "MONEY WINS BIG IN 2000 ELECTIONS, TOP SPENDERS
CAPTURE 9 OUT OF 10 RACES." A headline from a report by California
Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), another leading campaign
finance reform organization, blared "MONEY LARGELY DETERMINES
ELECTION OUTCOMES." Sure, the top spenders did in fact capture
nine out of ten races, but these sorts of headlines confuse cause
with effect: winners have more money to spend because donors know
in advance which candidate is going to win. Most districts have
been gerrymandered to produce that result. So donors are smartly
placing their money on the winners. They are buying access, not
elections-an important distinction.
While it is important to track information
like relative campaign spending, this kind of hyperbole posing
as analysis completely conflates reality and confuses the role
that the Winner Take All system plays in creating safe, noncompetitive
legislative districts. The intersection between money and votes
is complex, but it can be understood best when you realize that
incumbents are essentially CEOs of their own small businesses,
dedicated to the expansion of their political fortunes. Yet unlike
businesses in the free market, most incumbents have a monopoly
on their market because they decide who their consumers, i.e.,
voters, will be, via the redistricting process. Once the district
lines are set, the incumbents have a political monopoly over their
political fortunes.
Under the new paradigm, where money will
matter most is in the party primaries of the party that dominates
each district. That will be the real battleground for deciding
who wins and loses most legislative elections. But first the primaries
need candidates-63 percent of incumbents' primaries were uncontested
in 199S, presumably because the benefits of incumbency (widespread
name recognition, contacts and "buddyship" with establishment
leaders, editors, and the like, and the ability to raise gobs
of money if needed for a close race) scare off challengers. In
the handful of races for the primaries of open seats, better-financed
candidates will have an advantage since voters won't have the
benefit of party labels to guide them, and usually none of the
candidates have sufficient name recognition. For the small number
of contested races that are close, better-financed candidates
may gain a few percentage points that could prove to be the margin
of victory. But the number of close races is fewer and fewer every
year-less than 9 percent of House races in the 2000 election.
So here is yet another befuddling paradox
of our Winner Take All system: although most races are decidedly
noncompetitive, often even uncontested, ~) because of the lopsided
partisan composition of the districts, the stakes each congressional
cycle still can be huge because only a handful of races will determine
which political party will win a majority in the U.S. House or
many of the fifty state legislatures. With the major parties so
evenly divided, hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised
and spent as Democrats and Republicans joust for control, targeting
the undecided swing voters in those district with slick campaign
mailers and thirty-second TV spots. Says Burdett Loomis, a political
scientist at the University of Kentucky, "A lot of money
will flow to a relative handful of seats. In those seats, it's
nuclear war. Twenty miles away, there's nothing."
This paradox produces a certain schizophrenia
in the national psyche. Voters see headline after headline screaming
about all the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent on
our elections, about the Democrats and Republicans holding gold-plated
fundraisers, raising money from the same corporate clients in
the incessant drive to compete. Things certainly sound competitive,
and politics certainly appear bought and sold by big money donors,
even as most voters' experience is that of living in safe, one-party
districts. From the individual voter's point of view, politics
is a wash, a remote game that does not involve them, nor consequently
interest them; but from the Democrats' and Republicans' points
of view, every dollar and every swing voter count.
p111
Professor Douglas Amy, political scientist
Redistricting makes the inequities in
campaign financing even worse. Most elections are so non-competitive
due to how the lines are drawn that big donors already know who's
going to win. So they give to the likely winners to curry favor.
p112
The Republican House leadership decided to hinge the reward of
leadership positions and chairmanships of powerful committees
to those incumbents who raised the most "soft money"
for the party (money raised for a political party is called "soft
money," as opposed to "hard money," which is raised
directly for an individual candidate). Since committee chairs
have near-dictatorial powers to set committee dockets, dole out
pork, and establish the national agenda, this quid pro quo debased
government to a whole new level of crassness and political patronage.
What's more, the Republican leadership was able to do this because
most incumbents don't need a lot of money for their own reelections.
Most incumbents live in safe, noncompetitive districts where they
have about as much chance of losing as a snowball melting at the
North Pole.
So Speaker Dennis Hastert twisted the
arms of these safe-seat Republicans to raise money they didn't
need, demanding that they hand over the surplus cash to himself
and other party leaders. The leadership then was able to target
this soft money like a laser to the three dozen close races that
were about to decide control of the U.S. House and Senate. As
New York Times columnist Gail Collins put it, "The Speaker
of the House has already told Republican incumbents to raise money
for those [vulnerable] candidates or risk being transferred to
the Subcommittee on Toxic Waste."
As early as June 1999, seventeen months
before the next congressional election, ultraconservative House
Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) had handed over $100,000 each
to his party's ten most vulnerable House members. DeLay is a prodigious
fundraiser, raising millions of dollars for congressional elections,
which is conspicuous not only because of the sheer size of his
personal war chest but also because as a right-wing Republican
representing an overwhelmingly conservative Texas district, he
regularly wins with 70 percent of the vote. DeLay does not need
to spend a dime to win reelection. But his safe seat allows him
to raise millions and dispense it to colleagues, thereby gaining
their support when the Republican caucus elects him to its coveted
party Whip position, just two steps below the Speaker.
Not to be outdone, the Democrats engage
in similar practices, with Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt
and others paving the way. During the 2000 election cycle Gephardt
personally raised $37 million for the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee (DCCC), equaling the total the DCCC raised
during the entire 1998 campaign. Gephardt also campaigned for
sixty Democrats in thirty-five states, generating another $5.5
million for their campaigns. San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy
Pelosi was conspicuous in raising millions of dollars for her
congressional race to win an overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco
district that she regularly wins with 80 percent of the vote.
Pelosi is another of the many House members that do not need to
spend a dime to win reelection, but Pelosi was visible on the
other side of the aisle from DeLay, dispensing money to colleagues
in tight races in a bid to buy their support when the Democratic
Party caucus voted for party leadership positions. As a "soft
money queen," Pelosi managed to gain enough colleagues' support
to win election to the powerful party whip position.
A new "soft money king" on the
block is Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island), famous Kennedy
scion. He was made chair of the DCCC because he had become prodigious
at trading off his family name and scaring Newt-hating liberals
into ponying up big bucks. Kennedy brought the mystique and glitz
of one of America's premier political families to the rough-and-tumble
job of financing the party's drive to reclaim a House majority.
He rewarded big donors with visits to the dynasty's fabled compound
in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and entertained others at the
grand oceanfront mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, that are part
of his congressional district. He proudly invoked his legendary
uncles, John and Robert, "to help pry open wallets in circles
where the Kennedy name still sizzles."
The DCCC and its GOP counterpart were
the centers of action in the fight for the House, modern-day equivalents
of the old-fashioned political machine. Both committees not only
raised record sums of soft money, but they also targeted the money
to the right districts and recruited candidates, even trying to
anoint the party's nominees in certain contested party primaries.
But while both parties regularly engage in such shenanigans, House
Republicans in 1999 raised the bar and further debased politics
by publicly and unapologetically hinging these fund-raising efforts
to the awarding of leadership positions and committee chairs.
The corruptive effects of such a crass quid pro quo on our democracy
are obvious. Most legislative elections can't be bought because
they already are too lopsided and noncompetitive because of redistricting
and natural partisan demographics to even need to be bought. But
the geographic basis of Winner Take All and its basic measuring
unit, single-seat districts, allows safe-seat politicians to raise
money far beyond their own needs, and then dole it out in such
a way as to create their own political machines-yet another gaming
of the system.
A comparison of congressional campaign
spending trends from 1992 through 2000 reflects this change of
strategy predicated on the tactical partition of the Winner Take
All political map into competitive races versus noncompetitive
races. As this strategy of targeting money away from safe incumbents
and toward close races has taken hold, the median amount spent
per race went from being greatest in incumbents' races to greatest
in races for open seats. In fact, the median amount spent by incumbents
rose only 25 percent throughout the 1990s-barely keeping pace
with inflation, but it rose 140 percent-nearly six times as much
as incumbents' spending-for open seat races. Which makes sense,
given the realities of the Winner Take All political landscape,
where party leaders strategize over the political map like military
generals, figuring out which will be the close races and where
to sprinkle the most resources. The Soft Money Kings disproportionately
pour money into the handful of close races.
This amounts to further confirmation that
the role of money in politics is not as determinative as some
make it out to be. If it were true that "money buys elections,"
the Republican leadership would not be able to shake down their
Republican incumbents to steer money to the close races, nor would
they want to, because these incumbents would need that money for
their own reelections. That would be robbing Peter to elect Paul.
But the reality is no matter how much money opponents raise in
these)carefully crafted safe districts, their chances of beating
the candidate from the dominant party are about as good as hitting
the lottery.
Instead, the more complicated and nuanced
reality of Winner Take All politics has created a fund-raising
pecking order in which the "Captains of Cash" are rewarded
for raising excess funds that are handed off to colleagues in
closer races. This is how political machines and fiefdoms are
created and maintained, with all their progenies of patronage,
logrolling, and pork-doling. Such political juggernauts, rightly
targeted for reform of soft money abuses by the McCain-Feingold
legislation, are wholly a byproduct of the geographic-based Winner
Take All system, and the dynamics unleashed by that system. The
Captains of Cash and Soft Money Kings (and occasional Queens)
sit atop the soft money pile, dispensing favors and collecting
fealty, both within their own personal "safe" districts
and within the legislature, and then sprinkle their booty around
to targeted races, buying themselves higher ranking in the party
pecking order.
Here then, is the explanation to the seeming
paradox of thousands of noncompetitive safe seats swimming in
a sea of soft money and campaign millions- the battle is not for
reelection, since most legislators are easily reelected. The real
war being waged is for control of the Legislature and for all
the perks and power that come with it, such as control of legislative
committees and personal clout for individual Members who are appointed
chairs of committees and subcommittees. And for that effort party
leaders raise gobs of soft money and sprinkle it around, calling
the shots. The geographic-based nature of our Winner Take All
system combined with the Redistricting Roulette define this pyramidal
shape to our political landscape and permit this kind of gaming
and manipulation to go on. The fundamental noncompetitive nature
of most Winner Take A11 district races acts as a kind of lens
that collects money from all over the country and focuses it on
a few races where it can have overwhelming impact. This dynamic
is much more distorting of our democracy than simply "money
buying elections," since it concentrates and concatenates
power in a small number of hands and Rolodexes.
Especially at a time when control of the
U.S. House is likely to hang in the balance each election for
the foreseeable future, it means that a handful of political leaders
like DeLay, Armey, Gephardt, Frost, Pelosi, Kennedy, Hastert,
and the like will be able to maintain their own well-oiled political
machines, putting partisan and personality politics above sound
policy and the national interest. It means that donors will be
placing their bets with candidates they know will win, because
the Winner Take All districts have been drawn to produce that
result. Rather than buying elections, donors will be buying access
to and influence of legislative leaders ...
p117
... the decennial redistricting of geographic-based, single-seat
districts and its aftermath greatly define our political landscape.
Incumbent legislators and party bosses of the two major political
parties use sophisticated computers and comprehensive demographic
and polling data to render 90 percent of single-seat districts
into noncompetitive, essentially one-party fiefdoms, where most
incumbent politicians and parties are virtually guaranteed victory,
usually with landslide victory margins. The representation of
millions of voters for the next decade rested in the hands of
thousands of state legislators who decided redistricting, over
40 percent of whom ran uncontested-no challenger from the other
major party-even as they received millions of dollars in donations
that skirted federal law from congressional incumbents looking
to protect their own seats. Party leaders-the Soft Money Kings
and Queens-have created a pyramidal structure of political machines
that raises tens of millions of dollars of surplus "soft
money" that is steered to the few close races that, paradoxically,
will decide which party wins control of many state legislatures
and the Congress ...
p121
What is unique about the unrepresentativeness of the U.S. Senate
is that it bestows equal representation-two Senators-to all states
no matter how small their population, drastically underrepresenting
states with larger populations. The U.S. Senate was originally
designed by the Framers as a compromise to settle the Big State
versus Little State controversy, and the result was that low-population
states like Thurmond's South Carolina have been handed a "representation
quota," a kind of affirmative action for political representation.
Which is ironic, considering that affirmative action for racial
representation used in the House-the drawing of minority-opportunity
districts-is underjudicial and political siege.
Consider: more than one-quarter of the
United States population now lives in three very large, rapidly
growing states-California, Texas, and Florida, which also happen
to be three of our most racially diverse states-yet they are represented
by only six out of one hundred Senators. A mere 7 percent of the
total United States population, on the other hand, resides in
the seventeen least popular states and is represented by thirty-four
Senators, sufficient to kill any treaties or constitutional amendments.
Texas, with 21 million people, has the same representation as
Montana, with less than 1 million people. A Senator from Rhode
Island represents 500,000 residents, while a Senator from New
York represents over 9 million. California has sixty-eight times
as many people as Wyoming, yet these states have the same representation
in the U.S. Senate- Los Angeles County, with nearly 10 million
people, has a higher population than forty-two states. According
to author Michael Lind, today half of the Senate can be elected
by 15 percent of the American people, and just over 10 percent
can elect a filibuster-proof 41 percent of the Senate. By filibustering.
Senators representing little more than one-tenth of the nation
can block reforms supported by the House, the President, and their
fellow Senators, who represent the other 90 percent of the country.
Given current demographic and migration
trends, by 2050 as few as 5 percent of the population may have
majority power in the Senate. Clearly this is c demographic meltdown
in the making. By contrast, in 1789 when the first senators took
the oath of office, the ratio between the most populous state
(Virginia' and the least populous one (Delaware) was 11 to 1,
and it took a minimum of 3C percent of the national population
to assemble a Senate majority .. the Founders and Framers simply
did not foresee such dramatic population imbalances two hundred
years later. The alarming trajectory is toward one of an ever
more flagrant form of microminority rule. There is nothing "majoritarian"
about the United States Senate. These are demographic changes
that our two-hundred-year-old constitutional structures are ill
prepared to handle. Indeed the U.S. Senate is in the running for
the least representative legislature among Western democracies,
outside the aristocratic British House of Lords (which is in the
process of being substantially reformed).
Political scientist Robert Dahl, with
his usual gift for clarifying what other have made muddy, put
it this way:
Imagine a situation in which your vote
for your representative is counted as one while the vote of a
friend in a neighboring town is counted as seventeen. Suppose
that for some reason you and your friend each change your jobs
and your residence. As a result of your new job, you move to your
friend's town. For the same reason, your friend moves to your
town. Presto! To your immense gratification you now discover that
simply by moving, you have acquired sixteen more votes. Your friend,
on the other hand, has lost sixteen votes. Pretty ridiculous,
is it not? Yet that is about what would happen if you lived on
the western shore of Lake Tahoe in California and moved less than
50 miles east to Carson City, Nevada, while a friend in Carson
City moved to your community on Lake Tahoe.
The eventual destination of this trajectory
will be political bantustans where high-population and racially
diverse states will have barely any representation in the nearly
all-white, all-male Senate.
p127
... "the only Americans whose views are consistently magnified
by Senate malapportionment are white, rural, right-wing isolationists.
If you are nonwhite or of mixed race, if you live in a major metropolitan
area, if you are liberal or centrist, if you support an internationalist
foreign policy, or even if you are a conservative who lives in
a populous state,'' you are being shortchanged by the representation
quota-the affirmative action-bestowed upon low-population states
in the U.S. Senate. Tom Geoghegan, commenting in a 1994 article
in the New Republic about the Senate's proclivity to vote down
progressive reforms, wrote, "We can't raise our wages. We
can't get health insurance. No aid to the cities. And why? The
Senate votes it down. By a weighted vote, for small-town whites
in pickup trucks with gun racks all out there shooting these things
down.''
p127
Because of the Senate's unique constitutional role in screening
executive and judicial appointees and approving treaties, this
thoroughly unrepresentative body has a powerful influence on all
three branches of government, as well as on foreign policy. The
fact that the Republican Party has benefited since 1958 from this
representation subsidy speaks volumes about why the U.S. Supreme
Court has been so conservative for at least the past quarter century.
p135
The Electoral College and U.S. Senate are like ticking time bombs,
waiting to explode. In our twenty-first century multiracial, multipartisan,
and multicultural nation, the built-in representation quotas for
low-population, conservative, and predominantly white states in
both the Electoral College and the United States Senate point
inevitably toward a constitutional and racial clash. The situation
is very much like the British system in the eighteenth century,
which became known as a "rotten borough" system because,
in the absence of reapportionment, semi-abandoned rural towns
continued to "elect" members of Parliament while newly
burgeoning cities did not. Similarly, European immigrants in crowded
American cities during the nineteenth century were obstructed
electorally by rural Anglo-Protestant "rotten boroughs"
with sparse inhabitants who dominated malapportioned state legislatures.
Eventually the undemocratic nature of these statutory defects
was uncovered and abolished.
But the "rotten-borough" U.S.
Senate and Electoral College, and their representation quotas
for low-population states, remain largely unexamined, even as
the inequality grows worse. Burgeoning Hispanic and Asian populations
who tend to live in the largest states, as well as blacks also
living in these states, will recognize how their votes are being
diluted by the "rotten borough" of the Senate and Electoral
College. With our nation evolving toward a multiracial amalgam
without historical precedent, the Senate and presidency will continue
to look like white rural America. Shifting demographics are colliding
with antiquated, eighteenth-century, anti-democratic defects implanted
into our constitutional institutions. Like I have said in other
places in this book, almost sounding like a refrain: this is a
demographic built to blow.
Looking ahead, the question is whether
the Senate and our presidential election methods will enter the
twentieth century sometime during the twenty-first. Most legislatures,
not only in the U.S. but also around the world, base representation
on population-that is, on some semblance of proportional representation,
that a legislature should, in some fashion, represent and reflect
"the people." This is a principle that many popular
revolutions and struggles have fought and died for, wresting this
sacred democratic principle from kings, dictators, and tyrants.
It is a sound principle, and one that our American democracy proudly
exported to the rest of the world, so many years ago. But in the
United States, ironically, this principle still awaits fulfillment;
today, it must be wrested from the special interests of low-population
and predominantly conservative white states that benefit from
the defective Senate and Electoral College established by the
Framers.
Most alarmingly, given what is at stake,
it will be very difficult to reform our antiquated practices.
That is because the very states that benefit from this affirmative
action essentially have veto power over constitutional amendments
that require support from two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths
of the state legislatures. In addition, Article V of the U.S.
Constitution says that individual states must give their permission
to be deprived of equal representation in the Senate: "No
State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage
in the Senate." And Article IV, Section 3, provides that
no state can "be formed by the Junction of two or more States,
or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of
the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Not one,
but two poison pill provisions, in addition to the difficulties
of passing constitution amendments.
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