With Gerrymandering, Your Local Rep. Isn’t Local — And Isn’t Yours

By Jim Hightower

In a 2006 documentary, I assailed Texas Republican lawmakers for ramming a brutish gerrymandering scheme into law, doing my report from a street sign in central Austin.

That sign was the exact location the GOP had used as the pin point for slicing up the city’s one congressional district into four pieces like a pizza. Each slice radiated far out of town, merging into Republican suburbs in distant cities — thus suppressing Austin’s progressive voice in Congress.

Now here they come again, assaulting progressive voters throughout the state with  gerrymandering. At the command of Donald Trump, our so-called “representatives” are submissively shoving millions of Texans into jerry-rigged Trump enclaves, solely to serve his political desires.

Far from being just another corrupt hyper-partisan political manipulation, this GOP ploy is stripping away America’s fundamental principle of representative democracy.

Instead of grassroots communities sorting out their differences and choosing their own governing representatives in local elections, political hacks in Washington and the state capital are cynically relocating people’s political “locality” (with no participation at all by the people).

Instead of constituents choosing their members of Congress, gerrymandering lets members choose their constituents. So “your” representative doesn’t need to know you, much less serve you.

Thus, the issues that Congress considers don’t percolate up from local communities. They’re chosen by national and state political operatives and multimillion-dollar campaign donors. It’s the nationalization of local elections, ignoring the real needs of hometown people.

Why shouldn’t you have a representative who’s at least from your community, maybe even knows your name — and cares about something more constructive than Trump’s anti-democratic, plutocratic agenda.

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Previously Published on otherwords.org with Creative Commons License

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