Gerrymandering fun

For those who don't know, gerrymandering is the division of a geographical area into voting districts to give one party an unfair disadvantage.

The controversy over this was brought to the forefront a few years ago when the Texas state legislature - controlled by Republicans - redrew the state's congressional districts. Democrats accused Tom Delay of arranging the whole deal.

I already knew about that, though.

I didn't know this

The current controversy in Texas dates to the period just after the 1990 census, when Democrats still controlled both houses of the Texas legislature. Even though Texas was by that time trending strongly Republican in statewide and Presidential races, the Democrats drew district lines that enabled their party to win twenty-one seats in the House in 1992, compared with just nine for the Republicans.
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By 2000, Republicans controlled the governorship and the State Senate, but Democrats still had a majority in the Texas House. A deadlock between the two legislative bodies prevented Texas from adopting any redistricting plan, and the conflict ended up in federal court. The following year, a three-judge panel, ill-disposed to take sides in a political fight, ratified a modified version of the 1991 map, with two new seats awarded to high-growth districts. “The court essentially carried forward the 1991 Democratic gerrymander of Texas, which is increasingly problematic, given the over-all Republican tilt of the state,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University School of Law, told me. “The status-quo ante looked like a distortion.”
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On October 4, 2002, the DeLay PAC known as Texans for a Republican Majority sent a hundred and ninety thousand dollars to seven candidates for the State House. The following month, all seven were elected, and Republicans became the majority party in the Texas House.

“After the 2000 census, we never had a chance to vote on a congressional redistricting plan, because the court did it,” Tom Craddick, a close ally of DeLay’s, who became Speaker of the Texas House after the 2002 election, told me.

I'm not a big fan of gerrymandering either way, but it's important for people to know that it goes both ways with the political parties.

Oh, and I had to laugh at this part of the article (and something I didn't know).

In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander [James] Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison’s Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.

Oh, don't you just love politics?

“It used to be that the idea was, once every two years voters elected their representatives, and now, instead, it’s every ten years the representatives choose their constituents,” Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, told me.