Reason #8: “Gerry-rigged” Congressional Districts and Invincible Incumbents

“If our government is so broken and our politicians are so greedy and corrupt,” you might ask, “why don’t we just vote them out of office and get people in there who can make things better?”

If only it were that easy. It’s damn near impossible to get rid of lifetime politicians, especially because they actually get to choose who votes for them. That’s right. You thought it was us, the voters, who got to choose them, the politicians. But in reality, as the columnist John Fund once wrote, the politicians get to choose us, as in which voters get to vote for them .

What do I mean? This: every ten years, the U.S. Census Bureau counts the number of people in the country. These new population totals determine how many congress people each state sends to Washington. In the 1980 census, for instance, California’s population went up enough to receive two extra members of congress. In 1990, Pennsylvania actually lost a few representatives. That’s all well and good. But the problem is – who gets to redraw the political map to account for these new or missing districts? In just about every state in the country, the politicians themselves do.

Let me repeat that, in case you missed it: politicians get to decide which people vote for which politicians. If that sounds like a recipe for monkey business to you, it is. There’s even a special name for it: gerrymandering. The term was coined in the early 1800’s, when a Massachusetts governor named Elbridge Gerry drew a voting district that looked like a skinny salamander so that his party would win more congressional seats than its rivals.

Here in California, the shapes of our congressional districts would make even Mr. Gerry blush. After the 1980 census, Democratic congressman Phil Burton bragged that the new district map he’d concocted was “my contribution to modern art.” In 2000, my own district, Mike Honda’s 15th, went from a blowfish shaped blob to a narrow curving snake. Why? To protect Mike’s ass, that’s why. And to guarantee that every other incumbent around him – Democrat or Republican – had just the right mix of voters in his or her district to guarantee their reelection.

I spoke with former Republican state assemblyman Jim Cunneen the other day. He was in office during the 2000 gerrymander and he admitted to me that his party made a deal with the majority Democrats. As long as the Dems drew the map so that everybody in office stayed in office, the Republicans agreed to vote it through. That’s not exactly what the voters mean when they say they want “bipartisan” solutions to the nation’s problems. But these days, the only time the two parties seem to work together is when it comes to keeping themselves on the public’s dime for life.

These kinds of crooked cloakroom conspiracies are part of the reason I call the Democrats and the Republicans the D.O.P.es, or Dead Old Parties. They talk a good game about their differences in “governing philosophy,” but when you get down to it, the D.O.P.es only care about one thing: holding onto power, even if it means making dirty deals with the other side.

Elected Office = A Lifetime Appointment

Thanks to rampant gerrymandering across the country, about 400 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are now considered “safe.” How safe is safe? Most incumbents receive well over sixty percent of the vote. Often, their districts are so heavily skewed in their favor, no one even bothers to run against them. Here in California, our politicians have done such a good job of mapping out the most favorable districts for themselves that from 2002 to 2006, only four seats changed from one party to the other out of 495 state and federal races. That’s less than one percent!

NEXT: Reason #9: Ballot Box Bullies Boxing out the Little Guy