Redistricting Hypocrisy

Barack Obama’s in heavy rotation on Virginia radio, urging citizens to vote in favor of an amendment to the state constitution that would permit the legislature to redistrict the state immediately, between the 10-year census cycles that usually define the schedule. The ballot initiative, voting for which ends on April 21, is portrayed as a response to the mid-cycle redistricting of Texas, which was intended to add as many as five new Republican members of Congress (though it appears that they may end up adding as few as two when all is said and done).

“Virginia, we are counting on you,” implores Obama. “Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting ‘yes’ on April 21. It's the responsible thing to do."

But how responsible is it to endorse partisan gerrymandering, whether it embodies a hideous vengeance or not?

Obama is counting on "you" to be doing that, because "they" started it. Obama never would’ve endorsed maximum gerrymandering if Texas governor Greg Abbott hadn't endorsed it first. Fair enough. Obama and others have taken the strategic decision to reject their own convictions in the most obvious and practical terms. They've taken the strategic decision (common in our two-party system) to emulate their political opponents. I wouldn't have thought of Obama and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton as, you know, twins separated at birth. But they definitely agree on this gerrymandering business.

Obama, Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger, and others have (to repeat, and repeat) a very simple argument: they started it! Oddly, that was also Paxton's argument in redistricting Texas, as that last link shows. And it’ll be the argument in every state that gets gerrymandered in a newly extreme way over the next few years (that's likely to be many of them). It's going to be tits and tats across the map for the foreseeable future, and American democracy will get further and further from an honest representation of the people's will.

It should be amazing, but it isn’t, that the Democrats are currently conducting themselves by imitating the Republicans and enthusiastically endorsing precisely what they repudiate. That's morally surprising, as though God were imitating Satan or vice versa. But it’s not surprising at all in the context of two-party politics. In this world, if you lose, you study and reproduce what your opponents did to win.

That's how former anti-war activist John Kerry failed to condemn the Iraq war when he ran for president in 2004. It's why the Clintons did welfare reform in 1996, and why Bill condemned black activists such as Sistah Souljah after the LA riots in 1992. It's even why Donald Trump and a series of Republican congresses haven’t privatized social security, for example. To some extent, every cycle or two, the two parties just switch positions. It's a fiendish yet self-defeating tactic for electoral success, and sometimes it works.

It also turns you into your own enemy, or forces you to mutate into what you most vociferously attack. Who cares about that, as long as we win? is what I hear Barack Obama saying, again. It's the fierce urgency of now.

However, one may wonder just how effective this thrashing back and forth will be. If it keeps going like this, all states will be gerrymandered in an even more partisan manner than they are now, and everyone will have equal reason to endorse that, even as they absolutely oppose it as well, and simultaneously. They started it, after all. The Virginia amendment specifies that redistricting will return to normal after the next census cycle in 2030. But there will be all the same reasons and more, and the support of precedent, for keeping the gerrymandered districts in place, or to commit to partisan redistricting even more, next time. And roughly all states will have roughly the same motivations.

I avoid directly voting for principles (such as partisan gerrymandering and unrepresentative elections) that I strongly oppose, which Barack Obama is insisting I should. And I’ll point out that howling hypocrisy at this level is easy to avoid. You could not vote, and I think that the majority of Virginians will take this opportunity to disengage. The two parties are practically forcing us to.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell