Screw the Country

We're doing what's good for the party:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department's voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.

We definitely need national, nonpartisan, technologically-based redistricting reform that keeps in line with the Voting Rights Act and forces political competition. What we don't need are "reforms" like the one in Texas, which are naked power grabs, which we now see were viewed by the Justice Department as illegal, but then overruled because it would really really help maintain a Republican majority.

In California we just voted down a redistricting proposal, which I didn't support because of the how. But the "why" was right on. I'll be holding my representatives' feet to the fire on coalescing around serious redistricting reform.