More of the right thing

While I'm on the subject of Congress and doing the right thing, I want to talk about gerrymandering. This is a bad practice, and everyone knows it's a bad practice. The only defense I've ever heard of it is that the other guy does it too.

By perpetually redrawing Congressional districts so as to give one party an advantage, we undermine our political system.

We constantly hear about how divided our country is. Gerrymandering is an effort to take that divisiveness and hard code it into the system.

We hear a lot of complaints about how poor our candidates are and how corrupt our government is. Gerrymandering reduces competition and balance. Candidates with weak ideas aren't challenged, debate is squelched, and poor and incumbent candidates aren't held accountable.

We hear talk about voter apathy and disenfranchisement. But what is more disheartening and disenfranchising than living in a "loaded" district where the outcome is a foregone conclusion?

Gerrymandering is a tough thing to stop because it’s a tool of the party in power. So here's my suggestion: pass a law that ends the practice and that goes into effect at some point in the future. We don't know who will be in power in 2025 or 2035, so just pick a date and live with it.

I realize that districts occasionally will need to be redrawn for non-political reasons. Let this be done by a bi-partisan panel, or a computer program, or in some other relatively balanced way. We don't need a perfect solution. We just need a reasonable alternative to the damage we're causing now.