Bush Justice Deprt Wading into Partisan Fight
This sure seems like an abuse of power to me.
The Bush administration has come to the defense of Texas in a legal battle with political overtones, telling the Supreme Court in a brief filed yesterday that the state's 2003 congressional redistricting plan, drafted by Republicans, is fully consistent with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The redistricting plan, drawn up at the request of Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), who was House majority leader at the time, was designed to give Texas's House delegation a Republican majority to match the state's overall voting preference. After the 2000 census, the state's delegation grew from 30 seats to 32, and the shift to a Republican majority in Texas helped cement GOP control of the House...
Justice Department lawyers initially recommended rejecting Texas's plan, saying it would harm black and Hispanic voters, but were overruled by senior Justice officials. The legal standards used in the lawyers' analysis, however, were different from those at issue in the current case, which focuses on a separate section of the Voting Rights Act.
posted by Daryl McCullough
1 Comments:
Is Bush abusing his power? Bush views power the way a sadist views his victims.
Gerrymanders are always an abuse of power. I know everybody and his brother ;) has an election scheme, but here's a thought on eleminating gerrymandering. (It's would be much more easy to empliment on a state or local level, but could be used in Congress.) Instead of having winner-take-all districts, have each district be represented by two people--the top two vote-getters. Use an instant runoff so that people don't throw away their votes. But have each representative go into the legislature with a voting strength equal to the number of people who voted for him or her. In this way, the Republicans and Democrats would have equal numbers of representatives (with the occasional independent), but with voting stength exactly equal to the number of people who voted for their respective parties. Then there wouldn't be any point to gerrymandering.
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