I don’t see a way that a party in power could twist the laws to maintain minority rule. If I am wrong in my information, please correct me.
North Carolina has had a hell of a time with its general assembly district maps regularly having a heavily partisan bias. The current one that hasn’t been struck down yet is awful too. I can’t speak for all states, but my state legislature also periodically redraws its own district maps. Demographic change and population growth make that a necessity, and gerrymandering typically comes with the package.
So if the North Carolina general assembly chooses a Republican Senator and the voters prefer a Democrat, the voters have little recourse. As of the 2016 election, the current North Carolina gerrymander gives the GOP a 10% boost in terms of seats in the Assembly, so unless more than 60% of North Carolinians oppose, they really can’t do anything about it. And that’s with the gerrymander that wasn’t struck down as unconstitutional. And they’re always devising “better” maps, too.
Yes, that does mean there need to be gerrymanders of both state and federal districts to make this happen, but that’s already in place. It is not safe to assume state legislatures represent the will of the voters of the state, or that voters can simply vote them out if they do something the voters don’t like.
Only statewide offices can’t be gerrymandered. Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, US Senators, those sorts of offices. That’s it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Remedies
It seems reasonable to me that we can change the laws, such as having non-partisan commissions handle redistricting, which is how we do it in Arizona. It seems to better represent the will of the people and would negate that legitimate criticism of my argument of repealing the 17th Amendment.
Non-partisan commissions (technically bi-partisan commissions – if there’s ever a serious third-party challenge, both parties could still conspire to gerrymander them out of the equation) do seem to work pretty well as far as I’ve been able to tell. They’re not always problem-free (sometimes people can sneak things through that don’t look wrong superficially), but certainly MUCH better than the partisan redistricting used in most of the country. My state also has one, and the map we’re currently using has a slight Republican bias, but I think that’s only because the Democratic regions have had huge population growth since the last time the lines were drawn. The ten-year redistricting period is far too long IMO for high-growth regions.
A serious problem with the commissions is that they’re created by statute… so they can be disbanded by statute. If we’re going to do something to prevent gerrymandering, it should be at the level of a constitutional amendment. As it is, commissions suffer the same weakness as the Voting Rights Act. The courts can knock them down, and the legislature can simply get rid of them. In a place where one party controls the whole state government (most of the country), it’s just too easy to undo. As constitutional amendments, they would be protected. Considering the commissions are basically a way to ensure that the democratic process happens, I’m really not comfortable with one that can go away with a simple majority vote. So while I like my state’s redistricting commission, I do not think it’s adequate as the sole means of protecting the democratic process.
Assuming we had constitutionally-protected redistricting commissions in all of our states, I still don’t think I’d be on board with your plans for the 17th, but my hair wouldn’t stand up on end when you mention it, which I guess would be a start 😉
In related news, the Supreme Court just punted on Texas’s gerrymander, which means it will almost certainly be used in the 2018 Congressional elections.