“Gerrymander” is hardly the King’s English. It is a word born of politics, drawing its roots from a Federalist newspaper editor who complained about Jeffersonian Republicans forcing a re-districting bill through the Massachusetts legislature in 1812 that was said to give those Republicans a political advantage. Governor Elbridge Gerry was in office at the time, and the paper’s editor, seeing how the new voting district resembled a salamander, simply combined the names so as to blame the governor.
“Salamander! Call it a Gerrymander,” yelled the editor, whose Boston paper published this image.
Rachel described last night how this kind of thing, nearly 200 years later, remains a common practice by American political parties in this country — and why it is an especially big deal again now. In Arizona, Governor (and author) Jan Brewer’s interference with an independent commission and removal of its chairwoman was deemed a “Scott Walker-style power-grab from hell” by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
If all parties had voted to oust the chairwoman, that’d be what’s called a “sweetheart gerrymander,” in which both parties collude to preserve their own power. But with a 21-9 advantage in the State Senate, more than the two-thirds advantage needed by Governor Brewer needed to oust the independent commission’s chairwoman, who needs getting along to go along? What Arizona Republicans, the governor included, are aiming for is a “partisan gerrymander,” in which the party in power angles to keep that power by simply re-jiggering the districts.
A similar battle is waging in my native Ohio this week:
Statehouse Republicans and black Democrats were at an impasse Tuesday after the black lawmakers rejected an alternative congressional map redrawing districts for Ohio’s major urban cities.
Rep. Sandra Williams, a black Cleveland Democrat who heads the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, said a GOP offer to draw black voters together into districts unifying cities wasn’t enough for her caucus, primarily because it didn’t alter the map’s 12-to-4 ratio of Republican-to-Democratic districts.
“Accepting a 12-to-4 map is not something we are going to do,” she said. “That is unacceptable to me and other members of the black caucus.”
Despite not having a deal on the new map, Republicans plan to forge ahead with a vote on the version rejected by their Black Caucus. With a nearly 60-40 majority in the state house, they can pass it. The important detail is that they’re aiming to do something similar to what Governor Brewer did in Arizona: use a two-thirds vote in the House to pass it as an emergency measure. Why does that matter so much?









