Yes, it was an amendment to the Civil
Rights Act of 1968 that applied to all of the old Confederacy EXCEPT
Johnson forbid them to include Texas. Jimmy Carter decided to rectify
that situation. It only applies to race, not gender.
This is what caused the 1991, 1993, and 1995 redistrictings in
Louisiana. Louisiana is close to 2/7 black. It was supposed to get 2
black congressional seats out of the 7 it had. Problem was, outside of
New Orleans, they are not concentrated enough in any one location to
easily cram into a district. So you got the "mark of Zorro" district
that started in Shreveport and went across the top of the state then
down the Mississippi jumping over to Alexandria, down to Lafayette, and
across I-10 to Baton Rouge in 1991. Supreme Court threw that out. Then
you got the oblong football that went from Shreveport to Baton Rouge
encompassing Alexandria and Opelousas. It touched every TV market in
the state except New Orleans. VERY expensive to campaign in. Supreme
Court decided that Shreveport and Baton Rouge did not constitute a
valid "community of interest" and again tossed the map. Then the
Justice Department caved, and Louisiana was left with 1 black district.
Currently held by a Vietnamese Republican.
The DeLay redistricting of Texas in 2002 was changed by the Courts
according to the Voting Rights Act, because they reduced the minority
population in the 23rd district. They were told that they had to
maintain roughly the same percentage of Hispanics that the district had
before. This impacted the 23rd, 28th, 11th, and 21st districts, causing
special elections in conjunction with the 2004 elections. The 23rd went
from Republican to Democratic as a result. Some state representative
districts were also adjusted to increase Hispanic representation in the
Texas Legislature.
Yes, this helps the Democratic Party. It also helps the Republicans if
you get all of the blacks in a black district, most of what is left
here in Texas are white Republicans. So we have 2 black districts that
Obama won by 80/20. We also have some other districts that McCain
carried 76/24. They aren't that far from the Obama landslide districts
for some strange reason.
BTW, Democratic Socialist Workers Party was a jab at the Democratic
Party.
David
"A
pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical
good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If
we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We
shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the
government into taking it by force."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 3/27/2010 12:12 AM, [email protected] wrote:
WTH ? Guess my secret name is Rumplestiltskin. The Voting
Rights Act requires
set %s for minorities in Congress ? How is that constitutional
if women don't
get close to 50% of the seats, or Hispanics 12 % or whatever
their fraction of
the population is these days ? Asians come in at about 5 % now
also, and
while I'm all in favor of more Asians in office ( they tend to
be conscientious
and smart ), what's wrong with a fair fight for every office ?
About the "Democratic
Socialist Workers Party," there
is no such animal
except in Russia. Here in the
USSA you need to pick either the SP, which
is Democratic Socialist, or the
Socialist Workers Party, which is Communist
and at least somewhat
Trotskyist.
OTOH, the idea of a party
headed up by your daughter's puppy, considering
the alternatives we usually end
up with, is kind of a good idea if you ask me.
Billy
====================================================
In a message dated 3/26/2010 9:40:01 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes: There are only 2 things I
don't like here Ernie: 1) his predisposition to call the tea party
folks "nuts" and 2) your prejudging that I wouldn't like the article.
He was MIA in making the call of "nuts" against the BushHitler
demonstrators for eight years, so I think that his current diagnosis of
the tea party folks is extremely partisan in that regard.
Neither party is going to unilaterally agree to "non-partisan"
commissions redrawing legislative districts. It would be unilateral
disarmament. This might be forced on the parties in states with
referendums (like California), but it is less likely in Texas where it
would probably have to pass the legislature as a constitutional
amendment and then be voted on by the public. That's just how Texas
works. That faces more practical hurdles than philosophical ones. In
addition, something would have to be done to the Voting Rights Act
which now REQUIRES minority representation close to the percentage of
the population that said minority makes up. Thus, if Texas winds up
with 36 Congressional seats and the black population is 2/36 of the
states population, then 2 districts have to be drawn with a black
majority. The Act also applies to state representative and state senate
seats. One can SAY that such districts are not drawn in a partisan
fashion, but with the black population voting over 90 % Democratic,
everybody knows that such is bullshit.
Libertarians have LONG been looking for such an alternative voting
system. Glad to see that someone else is actually talking about it.
Then I could 1) Libertarian, 2) Republican, 3) Constitution, 4) My
daughter's puppy, 5) Democratic Socialist Workers Party.
On second thought, I might move the puppy up to 3.
David
"A
pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical
good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If
we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We
shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the
government into taking it by force."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 3/26/2010 2:13 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Our friend Thomas L. Friedman pushing the Radical Center. I like many of his ideas, but (as with the NAF) worry that it is still defined in terms of a) reaction, and b) a grab-bag of policies, rather than a coherent new philosophy.
- Ernie P.
P.S. Yes, DRB, I know you don't like his proposals...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=F1D5E68C1D76F3A6055E5844372865AD.w5?a=566866&f=28&sub=Columnist
OPINION
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Tea Party Without Nuts
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 24, 2010
President Obama's winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we're headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do - from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.
Say what? I write often about innovation in energy and education. But I've come to realize that none of these innovations will emerge at scale until we get the most important innovation of all - political innovation that will empower independents and centrists, which describes a lot of the country.
Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert, put it best: "If you don't get governance right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer."
My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America's disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.
The radical center is "radical" in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America's shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.
How best to promote these hybrid ideas? Break the oligopoly of our two-party system. Diamond suggests two innovations. First, let every state emulate California's recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design state electoral districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California's state legislative districts for the coming elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican - so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party. (There is a movement pressing for the same independent commission to be given the power to redraw Congressional districts.)
Second, get states to adopt "alternative voting." One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can't get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2. Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat. Therefore, you have no fear that in voting for an independent you might help elect your real nightmare - the Republican. Nothing has held back the growth of independent, centrist candidates more, said Diamond, "than the fear that if you vote for one of them you will be wasting your vote. Alternative voting, which Australia has, can overcome that."
Obama won the presidency by tapping the center - centrist Democrats, independents and Republicans who wanted to see nation-building at home "to make their own lives and those of others better," said Tim Shriver, the C.E.O. of the Special Olympics. They saw in Obama a pragmatist who could pull us together for pragmatic solutions. But hyperpartisanship has frustrated those hopes. (Alas, though, it is not equal. There are still many conservative Blue Dog Democrats, but the liberal Rockefeller Republicans have been wiped out.) If that radical center wants to be empowered, it can't just whine. It needs its own grass-roots movement to promote reforms like nonpartisan redistricting and alternative voting in every state. It's tea time for the center.
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