The headlines have become commonplace, and the official responses from many of our so-called legislative leaders have become predictable and morbidly routine. A 19-year old gunman, armed with an AR-15 assault weapon, killed 17 and injured 14 at Marjory Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine's Day. While the majority of us are crying in sympathy with the horrendous reality experienced by parents, family members, friends, neighbors and loved ones whose lives have been shattered, the majority of our legislators continue to pay homage to the gun lobby, and allow themselves to be bribed by the NRA. House Speaker Paul Ryan gave the stock response we have all become accustomed to: "Take a breath and collect the facts. We don't just knee-jerk before we even have all the facts and the data." Megyn Kelly, a sometimes controversial political commentator, and host of the NBC morning show "Megyn Kelly Today," offered an impassioned response to this most recent school shooting: "There have been at least 12 school shootings in America so far in 2018. It's February 15th. We are averaging one just about every three or four days. How are we doing, America? Everyone O.K. with that? Apparently the answer is yes, because we haven't done anything to stop it. We're going to say how sorry and shocked and sad we are, and then we're going to move on without doing anything. And then we'll express how sorry and sad we are at the next one, and the one after that. Does anyone really think that we are going to do anything after these mass murders? I don't."
Among the multitude of poignant headlines, two stood out for me. Gregory Gibson, an author whose son Galen was killed in a school shooting, wrote an opinion piece for the Feb. 18 New York Times entitled: "Why Wasn't My Son the Last Victim?" And the Wall Street Journal of Feb. 17 dedicated a full page to "Three Decades of School Shootings," which listed many of the more than 150 children and adults that have been killed in more than 70 shootings at kindergartens, elementary, middle and high schools, since 1990. Although these school shootings deserve our immediate attention, they don't include the many other mass shootings we have experienced. The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization which focuses on collecting this information, reported that from 2015 through 2017 we logged 1,046 mass shootings, which resulted in 1,260 dead and 4,667 wounded. Almost all of these mass murders involved the use of "America's most popular weapon," the AR-15 - a weapon which, according to the NRA, thanks its popularity to being "customizable, adaptable, reliable and accurate, and is versatile because it can be used for sport shooting, hunting and self-defense situations. (William Cummings and Bart Jansen, "Why the AR-15 keeps appearing at America's deadliest mass shootings," USA Today, Feb. 15, 2018.)
Every year roughly 35,000 Americans are killed with guns. This number includes suicides. Deaths from gun homicides in the U.S. totals 27 shot dead EVERY DAY of the year. By contrast, Japan only suffers 10, the U.K. 60, and France 130 EACH YEAR The U.S. is the only country featuring a right to keep and bear arms without constitutional restrictions. The National Rifle Association wants to insure it stays that way. As the lobbying arm of the gun industry, which in 2016 collected $51.3 billion in aggregate revenue, it will do everything to protect the industry, and oppose any form of regulation, reasonable or not. This includes granting gun permits to blind people in Iowa, or opposing the development of smart guns using biometrics, which would only allow the owners of guns to operate them. This would be especially relevant, since many killings are allegedly perpetrated with stolen weapons. Between 2005 and 2010, an average of 232,000 guns were stolen each year. Smart guns could make these guns useless to the criminals that steal them.
All of this information is common knowledge. However, to NRA hardliners this is inconsequential. Its supporters will spin the available data for political purposes. After all, the organization spends millions of dollars to keep the lid on any legislation it opposes. In 2016 it spent $51 million on the election - $31 million of which went to support Donald Trump, while the top 12 legislative recipients received a combined $48 million in bribe money.
A common deflection of pro-gun legislators when responding to massacres, is to blame them on perpetrators with mental issues. The problem with that argument is that we are not the only country with people suffering from mental illness - but in other counties these people don't stage massacres. The issue is not mental illness, the issue is easy access to guns, more specifically assault weapons. Besides, after the "Sandy Hook" killings, President Obama issued an executive order stipulating that the roughly 75,000 people who receive Social Security disability benefits due to mental impairments needed to be included in a data base that would keep them from buying guns. The NRA opposed the ruling, and President Trump deleted it shortly after taking office. That's some of what $31 million will buy. In the mean time Americans are 20 times more likely to get killed by guns than citizens of any other developed country, and, according to the Center for Disease Control, we have a 1 in 315 lifetime chance of dying that way.
While using circular arguments ("when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns"), the NRA will continue to oppose any attempt at getting this pandemic under control. They see themselves as the savior of our Second Amendment. They have become a semi-religious organization for many of its supporters, and they continue to hold sway over enough gutless legislators to keep sensible regulations from being adopted. In the words of Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., while admonishing his colleagues: "If you are not working to try to fix this, to try to stop these shootings, then you're an accomplice." In other words, when you allow yourself to be bribed with blood money, you end up with blood on your hands. It make you wonder if we should not label the NRA a terrorist organization.
One of the fathers whose daughter was killed in Parkland last Valentine's Day, while participating in a White House discussion on the subject on Feb. 26, very pointedly expressed his extreme frustration by exclaiming: "I am pissed!" Perhaps, if enough of us come together expressing the same sentiment, we can start something.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Monday, February 19, 2018
DOES GERRYMANDERING AFFECT DEMOCRATIC OUTCOMES?
With the run-up to this year's mid-term elections around the corner, the debate about the constitutionality, or basic fairness, of partisan gerrymandering of electoral district has resurfaced with intensity. The practice of gerrymandering refers to drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one party an unfair advantage over its rivals. Every ten years, beginning in 1790, the U.S. government has taken a census, an official count of its population. The Constitution requires this to be done to determine how many seats in the House of Representatives each state should have. Federal law requires a state to redraw the map of their congressional districts when they gain or lose as a result of a reapportionment of districts to that state. In 65% of the states legislatures are charged with the primary responsibility to create this redistricting plan. Much of the time oversight by partisan majorities has led to gerrymandered boundaries intended to help enhance the electoral dominance of the party in charge of the process.
The temptation to take advantage of this process is not new. Politicians have been redrawing district lines for their own advantage since the days of the founding fathers when Patrick Henry gerrymandered a Virginia district to try to keep James Madison out of Congress. The term "gerrymandering" was first used in 1812 by the Boston Gazette, after then Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill redistricting the Massachusetts state senate election districts in such a way as to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. One of the mapped contorted districts to the north of Boston was said to have resembled the shape of a salamander. The Gazette blended that observation with the governor's last name to create the word "gerrymander," which has stuck ever since. Although the Federalists handily won the House and the governorship that year, as a direct result of Governor Gerry's maneuvering, the state Senate remained solidly in Democratic-Republican hands.
As technology improved our ability to use more and more sophisticated analytical tools, the gerrymander process has become more effective, and, after the 2010 census, increasingly more blatant. After Republicans suffered sweeping losses to Barack Obama in 2008, one of their strategists, Chris Jankowski, hatched a scheme to target the redistricting process following the outcome of the 2010 census. The project as dubbed "Operation Redmap," "Redistricting Majority Project." Jankowski targeted states in which legislatures would be in charge of redrawing district boundaries, flip as many chambers as possible, take control of the process, and redraw the lines to effectively consolidate Republican gains. The party invested $30 million in this project, and it has been exceedingly successful in retaking control of the House of Representatives.
Mid-2017, using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantages designed to detect potential political gerrymandering, the Associate Press scrutinized the outcome of all 435 U.S. House races in the 2016 election. The analysis concluded, among other things, that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would normally have been expected, based on the average vote hare in congressional districts across the country. Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those showing significant Republican advantages. All had districts drawn up by Republicans following the 2010 census. (David Lieb, "AP analysis shows gerrymandering benefitted GOP in 216," June 25, 2017). A separate analysis by Princeton University concurred that Republican advantages in some states were "no fluke."
Our next census is scheduled for 2020. I for no other reason, partisans on all sides have a significant stake in the outcomes of the 2018 mid-term elections. The party ending up dominating the majority of state legislatures will take charge of redrawing the electoral district maps for the subsequent ten years. It is therefore no coincidence that multiple challenges contesting district boundaries that could help determine electoral results this year have been challenged in court, ultimately ending up in the U.S. Supreme Court. While the court has consistently found certain types of racial gerrymandering to be illegal, it has had a more difficult time applying similar rules to partisan gerrymandering. (Lois Beckett, "Is Partisan Gerrymandering Unconstitutional?," Pro Publica, Nov. 7, 20111). Thus far the Supreme Court has agreed to take up partisan gerrymandering appeals from Maryland, Wisconsin and North Carolina, cases in which lower courts have judged that their legislative district plans violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of our Constitution. In the North Carolina case, aa three judge panel pointed out that the legislator who drew the map, Representative David Lewis, blatantly acknowledged: "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So, I drew this map to help foster what I think is best for the country."
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, after analyzing the 2012 an 2016 congressional elections, reported that there is "clear evidence that gerrymandering is distorting the nation's congressional maps, posing a threat to democracy." Gerrymandering has become so aggressive, extreme, and effective, that there is an urgent need for the Supreme Court to set boundaries and finally establish a legal standard.
The temptation to take advantage of this process is not new. Politicians have been redrawing district lines for their own advantage since the days of the founding fathers when Patrick Henry gerrymandered a Virginia district to try to keep James Madison out of Congress. The term "gerrymandering" was first used in 1812 by the Boston Gazette, after then Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill redistricting the Massachusetts state senate election districts in such a way as to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. One of the mapped contorted districts to the north of Boston was said to have resembled the shape of a salamander. The Gazette blended that observation with the governor's last name to create the word "gerrymander," which has stuck ever since. Although the Federalists handily won the House and the governorship that year, as a direct result of Governor Gerry's maneuvering, the state Senate remained solidly in Democratic-Republican hands.
As technology improved our ability to use more and more sophisticated analytical tools, the gerrymander process has become more effective, and, after the 2010 census, increasingly more blatant. After Republicans suffered sweeping losses to Barack Obama in 2008, one of their strategists, Chris Jankowski, hatched a scheme to target the redistricting process following the outcome of the 2010 census. The project as dubbed "Operation Redmap," "Redistricting Majority Project." Jankowski targeted states in which legislatures would be in charge of redrawing district boundaries, flip as many chambers as possible, take control of the process, and redraw the lines to effectively consolidate Republican gains. The party invested $30 million in this project, and it has been exceedingly successful in retaking control of the House of Representatives.
Mid-2017, using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantages designed to detect potential political gerrymandering, the Associate Press scrutinized the outcome of all 435 U.S. House races in the 2016 election. The analysis concluded, among other things, that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would normally have been expected, based on the average vote hare in congressional districts across the country. Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those showing significant Republican advantages. All had districts drawn up by Republicans following the 2010 census. (David Lieb, "AP analysis shows gerrymandering benefitted GOP in 216," June 25, 2017). A separate analysis by Princeton University concurred that Republican advantages in some states were "no fluke."
Our next census is scheduled for 2020. I for no other reason, partisans on all sides have a significant stake in the outcomes of the 2018 mid-term elections. The party ending up dominating the majority of state legislatures will take charge of redrawing the electoral district maps for the subsequent ten years. It is therefore no coincidence that multiple challenges contesting district boundaries that could help determine electoral results this year have been challenged in court, ultimately ending up in the U.S. Supreme Court. While the court has consistently found certain types of racial gerrymandering to be illegal, it has had a more difficult time applying similar rules to partisan gerrymandering. (Lois Beckett, "Is Partisan Gerrymandering Unconstitutional?," Pro Publica, Nov. 7, 20111). Thus far the Supreme Court has agreed to take up partisan gerrymandering appeals from Maryland, Wisconsin and North Carolina, cases in which lower courts have judged that their legislative district plans violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of our Constitution. In the North Carolina case, aa three judge panel pointed out that the legislator who drew the map, Representative David Lewis, blatantly acknowledged: "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So, I drew this map to help foster what I think is best for the country."
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, after analyzing the 2012 an 2016 congressional elections, reported that there is "clear evidence that gerrymandering is distorting the nation's congressional maps, posing a threat to democracy." Gerrymandering has become so aggressive, extreme, and effective, that there is an urgent need for the Supreme Court to set boundaries and finally establish a legal standard.
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