Gerrymandering America’s elections

OPINION:

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Purse your lips, place one index finger perpendicular to your lips, both fingers if you’re a bully. Now shake your head.

Don’t say a word, however. Don’t even say shh. Don’t utter a sound. Now take your fingers, point to your eyes and then point to your bully mate. Why the hush-hush?

The battle over redistricting hits the highest court in our land in March, when opposing arguments over redistricting are scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court.

The judicial debate will be only the beginning of a lengthy fight over America’s longstanding political processes and turf skirmishes over money and votes, and that’s because the court’s redistricting decision will likely precede the three other battles — the 2020 presidential election, the 2020 census and what can surely be labeled the 2021 political battle royale for new redistricting.

To run the whole shebang, the White House, the Senate and the House. To rebuke Donald Trump and the Republicans, again. To reconfigure the Supreme Court. To gain majority rule of state legislatures. To wrap Hillary Clinton in whole cloth (and ask for forgiveness).

All in three or four years’ time? Bet on it.

Consider the hoopla that greeted the new Congress, the diversity, so called, of the bench players — women, American Indian, Muslim, Hispanic. The Congressional Black Caucus boasts its largest membership ever.

In the meantime, the same House royalty who were in place before the Donald won the keys to the White House in 2016 regained their crowns. Nancy Pelosi is House speaker, Steny Hoyer is majority leader and James Clyburn is majority whip. Look and listen closely and you’ll see the promises of fresh clout are but an illusion and the calls for real change have been muted.

Of course, the justices on the Supreme Court may see and hear things differently. After hearing oral arguments in a Maryland case and a North Carolina case, they could decide that justice should indeed be blind and that gerrymandering is a political process employed, well, to rig the process.

(By the way, redrawing boundaries to guarantee a political outcome would be for naught in D.C.’s City Hall, where the mayor and all 13 members of the D.C. Council are various shades of blue. There are no Statehood Green or Republican lawmakers. No Libertarians. No elected members of the I Wanna Be Me Party. Just regular Democrats who claim to be “independent” because the 1974 Home Rule Act requires it. There’s not much the Supreme Court can do about that at this juncture, unless someone decides to sue all the way to the high court.)

The redistricting/gerrymandering arguments presumably will focus on the forest of America’s political landscape — a far more pressing issue that affects far more people than the denizens of the L’il Capital.

Read up on Elbridge Gerry. A vice president, member of Congress and Massachusetts governor, Gerry signed into law a voting district map that an editorial cartoon in 1812 mocked as resembling a salamander. Hence the term gerrymander. And the Democratic-Republican Party was the beneficiary.

Gerry lost his re-election bid.

You can take the man out of politics, but you can’t take partisan politics out of law.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.