New Congressional districts slice and dice area, make 2012 elections kind of pointless
By Mike McGann, Editor, CoatesvilleTimes.com
In case you missed it, the final phase of the 2012 Congressional elections are going to be held next week. And the results, it appears, are already in.
Turn out, considering it was such a key election in Pennsylvania, was surprisingly light. Less than 300 votes, as it ended up.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that’s a bit of an exaggeration. All that actually is happening is the formal legislative approval of the new Congressional districts here in Pennsylvania. The state Senate, rushing between stops to pick up those holiday campaign contributions, approved the plan with no public hearing last week, while the house is expected to follow suit this week, with the governor signing it shortly thereafter.
The new districts appear, from here, to have been drawn to prevent any of them being lost to incumbents, beyond the one seat Pennsylvania must lose due to population shifts.
Shocking, I know.
Obviously, this was a kindness, as we Americans so deeply and thoroughly love our current Congress and heaven knows, we want to make sure each and every one of them stays in office until they get a better offer to lobby their former colleagues.
The Republican-controlled state house and our beloved Gov. Tom Corbett seem ready to sign off on the new map, although undoubtedly there will be court challenges aplenty — not to mention that the state Senate barely approved it. And just to be clear, had the Democrats been in control and had an option to draw the map, it would have been just as rigged, awful and non-competitive, just favoring their party rather than the GOP. Feel free to ignore the disingenuous map the Democrats distributed, it was nothing more than propaganda and nothing like what would have come to pass were they in power.
Heck, at least with Corbett and the GOP, they’re upfront about where they’re coming from, unlike former Gov. Ed Rendell who claimed to be all about open government, us little people and democracy, yet was just as quick to sell you and me out to the highest bidder.
And while it’s a statewide problem, sadly, we here in the greater Coatesville area (and as a newly-minted taxpayer in Valley Township, I get to be part of the “we”) are pretty much the poster children for redistricting run utterly and completely amuck.
First, there was Friday the 13th. Then, as you younger readers might recognize, the 37 Saw movies. But now, we have a real horror show on our hands:
The Seventh Congressional District. (Cue scary music and teenagers fleeing in terror).
Described as looking like anything from roadkill to something like a deranged bullmoose (I offered a lame duck…but no one else saw the resemblance), the new seventh is a work of art, well, at least if you consider the film catalog of Leni Riefenstahl to be art, that is.
While there’s literally hundreds of thrilling small details, there’s a couple of local ones I particularly love.
Caln is friggin’ hilarious. This lovely township mostly known as the home of Jim Sipala’s Kia of Coatesville has been split into three, count ’em, three congressional districts. That would be, for those of you keeping score at home, the same number of congressional districts as Philadelphia (with its slightly larger population) and one more than Pittsburgh.
Like’s Jim’s spokesguy likes to say: “That’s craaaaaaaazy!”
Joshua Young, a Caln commissioner also seeking election as State Representative in the new 45th District, puts it a bit more politely, but makes the point:
“It does not seem fair to residents,” Young said. “It could become unwieldy for the community to work with three different offices. Congressional districts are meant to be concise and compact. These new districts look like they were drawn household by household to benefit those in power and diminish the voting power of residents.”
“We need representatives that will stand up for residents, not powerful incumbents and special interests,” he said.
Wait a minute. That sounds almost ethical. Are we sure this Young guy is a politician?
But seriously, the district was shaped to maximize GOP vote in the 6th and 7th and shift Democratic-leaning votes into the 16th, which features a large block of Republican vote out in Lancaster and beyond. Voters or residents needs? Not so much.
To be sure, the Democrats would have been as bad or worse, likely merging the 7th and 6th districts to push out either Meehan or U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach and tweaking the suburban Philly districts to make them more Democratic friendly. West Bradford would have ended up in a South Carolina district.
Yeah, it’s gotten that bad.
Look, I know gerrymandering is an old American tradition — in fact, we’re coming up on the 200th anniversary of the term being coined. But there was always a pretense that the districts were kinda, sorta fair — and that actual elections could be held. But we’ve reached such a cynical point that it’s just easier and cheaper to decide these pesky Congressional elections in December in Harrisburg, but without sparing us months of nasty TV commercials, so we can all pretend there’s an actual election.
And folks wonder why voter turnout is lousy.
You might ask what can we do about this? Well, we could vote out those who supported this plan.
I pause now to allow you to stop laughing.
It’s not going to happen, partly because they all just got their districts redrawn to (mostly) make them easier to win (or no longer have to stand for election in the greater Coatesville area), but truth be told, we like our local legislators. It’s those other guys we hate, those greedy, rotten, self-serving folks from elsewhere in the state who are behind the rigging of our elections. Not our guys.
Actually, when it comes to our guys, well, one voted against it, Sen. Andy Dinniman, and the next local state rep. whether it be the above-mentioned Young, Downingtown Mayor Josh Maxwell, rumored to be running or Barry Cassidy, who is running, would not be likely to support such a map. Undoubtedly, a Republican will run in the new 45th, which is a bit like Democrats running in the old 158th, which used to represent much of the area — cute, but pretty ineffective. So local voters won’t have much of anyone to take their anger out on come next November.
Obviously, folks here might have a rooting interest in the race just south of here, in the 9th Senate District, featuring Senate Majority Leader Sen. Dominic Pileggi, as this was pretty much his dance. Sadly (well, not for him) he redistricted his only declared (and frankly, semi-interesting and/or competitive) opponent, former State Rep. Tom Houghton out of his district earlier this year, so there’s not much likelihood of the voters giving Pileggi a headstart on his career lobbying in Harrisburg.
You may have seen some complaints about the election in Russia being rigged recently. But to be honest, Vladimir Putin seems to have a lot to learn from our Sen. Pileggi. Makes you all kinds of proud, don’t it?
And so it goes.
