Forum: Should Racially Gerrymandered Districts be Eliminated By Law?

Every week on Monday morning , the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:Should Racially Gerrymandered Districts be Eliminated By Law?

Laura Rambeau Lee,Right Reason : Throughout the 20th century racially gerrymandered districts seemed to be a “fair” practice allowing minority voices to be recognized and counted in elections. Today districts are not so much racially gerrymandered as they are being drawn along party lines. It is no surprise that districts including predominantly African-American or Hispanic voters can be counted on to vote for the Democratic party candidate. We no longer need to draw districts along majority-minority lines. Racially gerrymandered districts should be eliminated.

Ask Marion :Racially motivated gerrymandering should be eliminated. There are no positive benefits from partisan gerrymandering. Districting should be delegated to a nonpartisan commission in each state or by programming a computer that will create districts of equal population that are geometrically compact.

JoshuaPundit :  In some ways, this should be  a Tenth Amendment Issue. In theory, the feds shouldn't be telling the states how to construct their voting districts, as long as there are no federal issues, such as deliberate obstruction to citizens exercising their voting rights.

However, what's happened lately is that the Feds have stepped into this with both hands and feet, deliberately obstructing the active duty military vote, fighting legitimate attempts by the states to enact reasonable voter ID laws, refusing to investigate obvious voter fraud for partisan or even racial reasons and even refusing to prosecute blatant voter intimidation, again on a partisan and racial basis.

The current system of racially gerrymandered districts is practiced exclusively by one party, and largely discriminates against whites and Asians. Certainly if whites demanded specially gerrymandered districts 'to make sure our voices are heard' they would be denounced, justifiably as racists. It is time this practice was ended, and it should be a matter of federal law.

Nor is the usual argument, that this would somehow deny minorities a voice valid in my view. It has already been amply proven that whites will vote non-whites into office. By allowing these partisan, racially gerrymandered districts, are we somehow implying that blacks and Hispanics are more racist than whites?

This strikes me as the typical Leftist bigotry of low expectation, and in any case, it is simply an unjust  practice.

 Well, there you have it!

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