Gerrymandering in America by Anthony J. McGann, Charles Anthony Smith, Michael Latner, Alex Keena

Paperback, 272 pgs, Pub July 11th 2017 by Cambridge University Press, ISBN13: 9781316507674

This academic look at gerrymandering—how to measure it, how one does it most effectively, and what exactly are its effects—was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press—yes, the British one. One author, Anthony McGann, is from Glasgow. The other three authors, Charles A Smith, Michael Latner, and Alex Keena, are all professors from CA institutions.

For someone new to the term gerrymandering, this definitely won’t be the easiest entry, but to someone more familiar, it has enlightening bits. They talk quite a lot about Pennsylvania, one of the worst gerrymandered states in the country. You may have heard the State Supreme Court in PA deemed the congressional maps so egregiously gerrymandered they ended up providing a new map to a recalcitrant state legislature in 2018.

After 2011 redistricting, though Democrats had won over 50% of the votes for congresspeople in the state, they managed to win only 5 of 18 congressional seats. After the State Supreme Court passed down the new maps in 2018, Democrats won 9 of 18 seats.

Actually, depending on where Democrats reside, there is no reason why 50% of votes should necessarily translate into half the seats. No one really cared if they didn’t. It was the relative skew that was offensive, and the ugly fact that the state legislators in office did nothing with their supermajority but pass innocuous resolutions, e.g., Dec 12 is Polar Bear Day, and Sept 13 is Healthy Heart Day, and avoid talking about the 18 cities in PA, including Pittsburgh, with lead levels higher than Flint, Michigan.

In Pennsylvania (and Wisconsin and Michigan and…) today, voters must face the horrible problem of having their state legislative districts so gerrymandered that no one will even run against incumbents. We can’t even vote the crooks out.

After the June 2019 SCOTUS decision not to deal with any more gerrymandering problems in federal courts, disenfranchised voters will be forced to bring maps redistricted after the 2020 Census through the state courts again. Meanwhile, nonpartisan volunteer organizations are blanketing the state with petitions to urge legislators to “do the right thing” and voluntarily give up their constitutional right to draw district lines, for the sake of fairness and democracy. So far, legislators haven’t shown interest in anybody's constitutional rights beyond their own.

Claims have been made by some that the self-sorting voters do along partisan lines into cities and rural areas is responsible for the bias in results, not the intentional gerrymander. However, these scholars have concluded self-sorting is not responsible for the extent of the bias in results, and gives examples of several states also with city/rural dichotomies that do not exhibit partisan bias. Many states exhibit extreme partisan bias, Pennsylvania among them.

There is a trade-off between seat maximization and incumbent protection. Regions with competitors packed into one district have extraordinary non-responsive voting blocks in the surrounding districts.

"Put bluntly, if you can pack your opponents into a single district where they win 80% of the vote, you can create [surrounding] districts where you have a 7.5% advantage. It is notable that the number of “incumbent protection” districting plans declined sharply between 2002 and 2012. It seems that more states are districting for national partisan advantage, even though it makes their incumbents slightly more vulnerable.”

The authors make a distinction between partisan bias and responsiveness. “If there is partisan bias, then one party is advantaged over the other…If a districting system has high responsiveness, then it gives an advantage to the larger party, whichever party that happens to be.”

Worst of all, in reviewing what I wanted to say about the pitiable position Pennsylvania’s manipulative legislators have left us in, near the top of the Top Ten Exhibiting Partisan Bias… worst yet is that the states above Pennsylvania in #4 place are states we never hear anything about. No, they are NOT Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin North Carolina, or Maryland. They are Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, states with large populations of African American voters so used to being beat up and beat down they don’t even protest anymore. Of course the government is going to steal their vote. Oh, it is enraging.

“...districting is mathematically a very, very difficult problem...”

The California independent redistricting commission may have been partly modeled on the British iteration, called Boundary Commissions. Boundary Commissions are explicitly forbidden from considering partisan data when deciding their maps. This has actually led, in CA as well, to skews that were unintentional but partisan in fact. As a result, CA commissions have made the unusual request that they must consider partisan data in order to avoid it.

A summary of the difference between Boundary Commissions and U.S. election districts and commissions: 1) Britain is not two party, which makes a huge difference in the attempt to gerrymander. People have been known to calculate their vote in order to stymie any gerrymander. That is, there is tactical voting. 2) A source of bias is not a gerrymander but is caused by differential turnout. “Labour tends to win when fewer people vote.” 3) Districts are not the same size nor same population as is required in U.S. congressional and legislative districts. This presents a small bias towards Labour. 4) The authors are not sure what the last advantage is: “If there is something about geographical distribution of support that has given Labour an advantage, it is not clear what it is.” One explanation…is that Labour appears disproportionately successful at winning close races.

Anyway, they conclude there was a partisan bias in Britain for whatever reason after 2010, but it seems to have disappeared by 2015. The Boundary Commissions have no real effect at preventing partisan bias because it explicitly cannot take partisan bias into account: “Fairness between the political parties is not a factor that can be considered.”




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Gerrymandering by Franklin L. Kury

Paperback, 132 pgs, Pub May 4th 2018 by Hamilton, ISBN13: 9780761870258

Franklin Kury is a former member of the Pennsylvania State Senate, serving 1973-1980. Just last year he published a book about Pennsylvania’s bout of gerrymandering after the 2010 census, documented as one of the worst in the nation.

The League of Women Voters challenge to the maps yielded a win for voters. In 2018 the state Supreme Court handed down what has turned out to be a landmark ruling:

“For the first time, those seeking a new Congressional districting plan went to the state courts and relied solely on state law.”

SCOTUS relied on this ruling as they looked at gerrymandering in their decision handed down at the end of June 2019. SCOTUS decided it would not decide gerrymander cases through the judiciary at the federal level because it is inherently political. They cited the PA decision to show that state courts can decide these things, effectively handing the fight back to the states.

Gerrymandered states wonder what exactly that means. If the judiciary at the federal level can’t make the call on what is a gerrymander, why can the state courts decide these things? This is the source of the disagreement between the assent and dissent on the latest SCOTUS decision concerning gerrymandering.

Kury’s book came out before the latest SCOTUS decision, so is merely speculative on how the court would weigh in. Meanwhile, he describes the problem Pennsylvania continues to have with gerrymanders in the electoral districts for state legislative offices. According to the PA constitution, “municipalities and counties should not be divided more than is required by population plus one.”

By that criterion, Pennsylvania’s Butler County should have three state house members, but has seven. It also has three senators, when it should have only one based upon population. Montgomery County should have 13 state house members but it has 18 and twice as many senators -- 6 v. 3. The list goes on. And that doesn’t even touch the problem of cities, chopped to bits, pieces of which are roped in with their rural surrounds.

Pennsylvania’s legislative electoral maps effectively shut out all but one party in power. That party, the Republicans, have such a firm hold on their caucus they don’t even primary their candidates. They hold private local meetings wherein they choose who will go on the ballot. There is only one candidate per office when it comes time to primary. And of course the general has that same single candidate once again.

The minority challenger party can have a raft of candidates to choose from, but because they are not using ranked-choice voting, sometimes a less desirable candidate comes up higher on the list than anyone wants. And since Republican ballots are single candidates, Dems with more than one candidate per office will suffer the count. Don’t even mention Independents or third-party voters: they can’t vote in primaries unless they register with one of the major parties.

Kury’s book explains where the term ‘gerrymandering’ comes from and moves quickly to discussing RedMAP and the Republican attempt to take back the House of Representatives, which they calculated might be done by focusing on ‘cheaper’ state races and controlling redistricting. By ‘cheaper’ they meant less expensive purchases of advertisements, events, and media influencers than trying to put in national candidates the same way. They were right about that.

What is riveting about gerrymandering is that it is so clearly unfair. Pennsylvania is a state that used to take its fairness and integrity seriously. Once awakened to partisan gerrymandering, it is difficult not to see it everywhere. Even states who have tried to fix the problem by instituting an independent citizens redistricting commission have been accused of gerrymandering because of their mapping choices. Kury writes up a few of the more famous instances of independent commissions, which it turns out, come in many different sizes and with a wide range of decision-making authority.

Best of all, Kury’s book lists resources that will help any individual struggling with redistricting issues in their own state to find what happened elsewhere. He discusses redistricting software and some of the issues that arise when one tries to map districts from scratch. That’s the thing with gerrymandering: one wants to see how others dealt with it to see if their solutions will work. For Pennsylvania, the struggle to claw back voters rights continues.

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Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence by Shane Clairborne & Michael Martin

Paperback, 288 pgs, Pub March 5th 2019 by Brazos Press, ISBN13: 9781587434136


Shane Clairborne, Christian activist and motivational speaker, and Michael Martin, former Mennonite pastor and founder of RAWtools.com, a company that turns donated weapons into gardening tools, wrote this book about the work they do together. Tired of gun violence in America, the two are traveling the country and speaking out to remind us we are not where we want to be as a country.

Research shows that most Americans already agree with them. Why are our children still dying in mass shootings? We are being help hostage by a profit-making industry that cares little about the lives lost to inadequate gun controls; our “religious right” is actually wrong and has only been mouthing Christianity and not living it; there is a skewed religiosity and a profit motive among preachers and teachers as well, like Jerry Falwell Jr at Liberty University. The words of these two authors reassure me that my reason has not been deceived: I have long thought there is a rot somewhere in traditional religions that is killing the source of our morality.

This long conversational history rounds the bases on reasons we should consider turning our guns into garden tools and shares the sources of the authors’ own decision to spend their energies on this effort. They teach, better than any pastor I’ve heard in many years. They quote the Bible, Jesus, and leaders of nonviolence movements in the past, pointing to the undeniable bottom line that Christians are not meant to arm themselves against those who come to hurt them. They are meant to do as Jesus did during his years on earth: defuse the situation, change the subject, turn the other cheek, and yes, die for one’s beliefs. Because the idea for which he died will never die.

Every few pages, like tombstone markers, pages describe one or another incident of gun violence, naming the victims and reminding us of the circumstances. Most of these twenty or so tombstones are as familiar to us as our own names, horrific and shocking incidences of unnecessary and impersonal violence by people mad with delusion. It is hard to understand how our politicians dare stand in front of us; dare to speak a word to us without offering to protect us by controlling guns.

Shane and Mike have done their research on the NRA, and do not hesitate to point to the ways our nation’s dialogue has been warped by the nominally nonprofit’s profit motive. The NRA boasts some five million members. If we do the math—one-third of 325 million U.S. residents are gun owners—over 90 percent of gun owners are not represented by the NRA. But their lobbying arm keeps politicians flush with cash for their campaigns. This trade-off should be outlawed, but even our courts have refused to look after the people’s interests with regard to this matter.

A chapter detailing “the absurd” of pride in gun ownership recount instances of folly: an instance where a groom posing with a rifle at his wedding accidentally shoots his photographer. Or the Hello Kitty assault rifle handled by a seven-year-old that managed to kill a three-year-old.

In a chapter named “Mythbusting” the authors address things we might be persuaded to believe without evidence, like “Stranger Danger.” Actually, we’re far more likely to be killed by people we know well. Regarding the old standby, “Guns Keep Us Safe,” the argument is so shopworn by now that statistics start to sound like “the absurd” chapter. The men discuss race and guns, veterans and guns, women and guns, and they quote Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court as saying the Second Amendment is “a relic of the 18th century.”

This is a worthwhile book, giving us the language and statistics we will need to surprise our opponents into silence, unable to find a reasonable comeback if we are using logic and not emotion. The U.S. has about 270 million guns in circulation, 42% of guns in the world, or 90 for every 100 people. Forty-four percent of Americans personally know someone who has been shot, accidentally or intentionally. Christians are challenged to explain the fact that 41% of white evangelicals own a gun, compared to 30% of the general population. The authors ridicule the defenses they’ve heard for gun ownership among religious people and point out that Jesus teaches countering aggression with creativity, not submission:

”evil can be opposed without being mirrored…oppressors can be resisted without being emulated…enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”

Finally the authors remind us that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. They explain that “fear not” is the most reiterated commandment n the Bible and that powerful people who are afraid are the most dangerous elements in the world. We really do have more to fear from fear itself. We need courage to stand in front of armed neighbors and say no to guns, but these men are handing us the tools.

Shane Clairborne is a Philadelphian when he’s at home, and is founder of The Simple Way, a social services organization in Philly. He is President of Red Letter Christians, a Christian group which mobilizes individuals into a movement of believers who live out Jesus’ counter-cultural teachings and tries to combine Jesus and justice.

Michael Martin teaches nonviolent confrontational skills in addition to beating weapons into ploughshares. These are the kind of Christians I like and admire and would travel to hear.



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The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates

Hardcover, 273 pgs, Pub April 23rd 2019 by Flatiron Books, ISBN13: 9781250313577

Melinda Gates has a famous name and job, but who knows what she actually does? Running a foundation with assets exceeding that of many countries must carry enormous stresses, particularly for people who understand that injecting cash into a problem may actually make the problem grow. What courage it must take just to try.

This had to have been a hard book to write, what with a crushing schedule, children, and weighty responsibilities, to say nothing of the disparate and discrete problems of women on different continents. I am not saying there aren’t similarities among women’s experiences the world over; I’m saying that, perhaps for the purposes of this book, on each continent Gates honed in on a different critical problem among women that she might be able to affect. In Africa, she showed us women responsible for field work and cultivation. In South Asia, we look at sex workers. In America, it was education. In every country the message was about empowerment and equality.

Gates sounds tentative and naïve to begin which may help her audience connect with her experience. But she has some insights sprinkled all the way along as we follow her progress from Catholic-school Texan to one of the few female programmers at a gung-ho win-at-any-cost Microsoft. Two early insights:

“I soon saw that if we are going to take our place as equals with men, it won’t come from winning our rights one by one or step by step; we’ll win our rights in waves as we become empowered…If you want to lift up humanity, empower women.”

Gates wonders how she could have missed these two insights early in her foundation work, and I did, too, considering this was something Hillary Clinton hammered pretty hard during her years as First Lady and Secretary of State. Both Gates and Clinton had international reach and the massive resources to understand exactly where the latch was to unleash potential and creativity. Why Gates never mentions Clinton is a mystery, unless she is trying assiduously to avoid any political fallout. That can't be right, though, as Gates is pretty fearless weighing in on religious issues which have become political.

When speaking of her Catholicism and her support for birth control, that is, the notion that women must be able to control their own births, Gates says that religion and birth control should not be incompatible. She feels on strong moral ground and welcomes guidance from priests, nuns, and laypeople but “ultimately moral questions are personal questions. Majorities don’t matter on issues of conscience.” Drop mike. My hero. She gives me language to speak to critics who wish to roll back women’s right to choose. It’s not an easy decision but it is a woman’s decision. Otherwise, Christian critics, why did God give this ability to women alone?

Melinda shares some empowerment struggles of her own—in a company and in a household with Bill Gates. She was intimidated, but can you blame her? With support from Bill and from colleagues and friends, she managed to develop her innate ability to cooperate and thereby manage high-performing teams, both at the company and later at the foundation.

Later, Gates asks how does disrespect for women grow within a child suckling at his mother’s breast? Gates places the blame squarely on religion: “Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men.” That is a brave stance, the articulation of which I am grateful. I also came to that conclusion, and it felt a lonely one. I wondered how my moral grounding felt so strong when I learned what I had in the Catholic tradition also. Perhaps our reactions are something along the lines of the questioning, probing Jesuitical tradition?

“Bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice, and not only are religions our oldest institutions, but they change more slowly and grudgingly than all the others—which means they hold on to their biases and blind spots longer.”

When she is wrapping up, Gates shares something that will help all of us in this country as we struggle through the next period, trying to avoid the dangers of political and ideological attacks (from within!) on our constitution and on our future development and ability to face the existential dangers of climate change. She gives examples of women who have brought peace to warring factions in their country and says

”Many social movements are driven by the same combination—strong activism and the ability to take pain without passing it on. Anyone who can combine those two finds a voice with a moral force.”

This, I submit, could be the very key to unlocking the potential of our future. Conservatives complain relentlessly about the yapping left. Essentially, I agree. We have to stop going to the least common denominator.

Women! stand up and show them how to both nurture and progress. Democrats and Republicans, we have way more in common as women than we have differences as political animals. And we have as much at stake. Those who are already empowered can make decisions on their own, so aren’t intimidated by women who may occasionally disagree. Isn't this how we learn? Those who seek empowerment can find it with other women, so join us. I definitely think there is room to work together to achieve something we haven’t yet managed here in the U.S. and need badly: coherence.

Gates’ last point is one close to the hearts of every mother, teacher, groundbreaker:

“Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem. Overcoming that urge is our greatest challenge and our greatest promise."

The Left is in agreement with the Right that every member of society must contribute something. No one wants to think they do not contribute. It is up to us to find ways for everyone to do so. And to those who insist they “got where they did by themselves,” well, go live by yourself. Praise your great wealth by looking in the mirror.

Gates has written a thought-provoking and generous book, sharing much of what she has been given.



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The Making of a Justice by Justice John Paul Stevens

Hardcover, 560 pgs, Pub May 14th 2019 by Little, Brown and Company, ISBN13: 9780316489645

Justice John Paul Stevens appears to me to be one of those old-timey conservatives, the kind whose judgment I may not agree with but whose opinions I can respect. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen such clear thinking on the part of anyone who calls themselves Republican.

Stevens served on the Supreme Court thirty-four years, from 1975-2010. He did an awful lot of deciding in all that time; what I notice most is that these decisions, or at least the ones he discusses in detail, are ones that made a big difference in the life of ordinary Americans. We all knew the Supreme Court was important, but how quickly the perception of partisanship has begun to erode their power.

Stevens names time periods in the court for the newest member because that individual alters the balance of power. He discusses important decisions each new justice has authored that might be considered to define that justice’s body of work and places his own assents or dissents beside them.

One of the earliest discussions he wades into is the abortion debate. Stevens was seated two years after Roe v. Wade and says at the time the decision had no appearance of being controversial.

Criticism of Roe became more widespread perhaps in part because opponents repeatedly make the incorrect argument that only a “right to privacy,” unmentioned in the Constitution, supported the holding. Correctly basing a woman’s right to have an abortion in "liberty" rather than “privacy" should undercut that criticism.

Just so.

The 2003 case involving a challenge to the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s 2002 congressional districting map, Vieth v. Jubelirer, is close to my heart. Hearing Stevens articulate why deciding partisan gerrymanders are not a heavy lift gives succor to like-minded in light of the devastation of a final refusal by SCOTUS to hear any more such cases.

Why is it any more difficult than deciding a racial gerrymander, he asks. Why can’t the Court stipulate every district boundary have a neutral justification? There are no lack of judicially manageable standards; there is a lack “judicial will to condemn even the most blatant violations of a state legislature’s fundamental duty to govern impartially.”

Stevens remained puzzled by his failure to convince his colleagues on the Court of his argument, an early echo of Justice Kagan’s distress this year that the blatant partisanship of the Court has broken out into the open and split the harmony with which they argued for so many years.

Stevens does not leave out decisions he wrote that were disliked by the country. Time never disguised the ugly truth that in Kelo v. The City of New London , a multinational pharmaceutical corporation looking around for a new development used the notion of eminent domain to take the homes of two long-time residents of New London, and then, within five years, closed up shop and left town. “…the Kelo majority opinion was rightly consistent with the Supreme Court’s precedent and the Constitution’s text and structure [but] Whether the decision represented sound policy is another matter.”

After the Citizen’s United decision with which he disagreed, Stevens tendered his resignation.

“…it is perfectly clear that if the identity of a speaker cannot provide the basis for regulating his (or its) speech, the majority’s rationale in Citizen’s United would protect not only the foreign shareholders of corporate donors to political campaigns but also foreign corporate donors themselves.”

By hardly ever mentioning fellow Justice Sam Alito Stevens shows his animus. After this decision, Stevens describes Alito sitting in the audience during Obama’s State of the Union. When Obama mentioned that the decision allows foreign corporations to have a say in American elections, Stevens writes Alito “incorrectly” mouthed the words: “Not true.”

He revisits Alito’s record later, when he is wrapping up, to point out “especially striking” disagreements he had with him over interpretation of the Second Amendment. “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” he says. [Alito] failed to appreciate the more limited relationship between gun ownership and liberty. Firearms, Stevens argues, “have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.”

It probably wasn’t the Citizen’s United decision itself that brought the Stevens reign to an end; he may have had a small stroke after the pressures of that January decision and then playing a game a tennis. He was replaced by Elena Kagan, with whom he has professed to be delighted. Stevens didn’t so much change as a large portion of the country who once, and still do, call themselves Republicans moved to the right. Stevens never did and he was right where we needed him for thirty-four years.



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