This is part of a letter that I wrote to WaPo columnist William Raspberry after he wrote one of the many columns he's written about the evils of partisanship. In this instance, he was writing about redistricting reform. While I like Raspberry overall, and like his thoughtfulness on issues, I wish he didn't buy the Post party line about partisanship being the root of all evil. As always, I'm curious about what other people think.
Thanks very much for your editorial today about redistricting. While I agree with some of the points of the redistricting reformers like the one you profile in your editorial, much of what they advocate is based on dubious or false premises or assumption. I have read these premises numerous times on the Post op-ed page, so I think I should go over them one by one.
Premise #1: A district which has partisan leanings is inherently bad and undemocratic, and somehow "unnatural."
Answer: The reformers have forgotten that districts don't vote; people do. The population of Harlem (to take one example) numbers somewhere around 550,000 people, about the same number as a House district. The voters there vote Democratic almost to a man and woman. It's hardly undemocratic or unnatural to make Harlem its own Democratic-leaning district; in fact, to reduce the Democratic tendencies of a Harlem-based district, you would have to draw lines that included far-flung parts of Westchester County and other New York suburbs, something that seems less "natural" to me than to make Harlem its own district. No one makes the people of Harlem vote overwhelmingly Democratic, any more than anyone makes the voters of the Houston and Dallas suburbs vote Republican. I therefore don't see why it is so undemocratic to have a Harlem-based district with lots of people in it that vote for a particular party. I agree with the reformers that not EVERY district should have a partisan lean, but I don't think every single one has to be close and competitive (or at least close and competitive in the general election) for the country to be a democracy.
It's also true that it is very hard to completely prevent any partisan leanings in legislative districts. The state of Iowa in the 1990's "took the politics out of redistricting" by dividing the state into five more or less equal districts by county and population. Nevertheless, the state still ended up with one district that leaned strongly Republican, two districts that leaned to the Democrats, and two that were competitive. (One could argue that this redistricting plan was actually unfair to Democrats, since the state spent most of the 90's with only one Democratic House member, even though the Democrats have won the state electoral vote in every election since 1988.)
Premise #2: Partisanship is inherently bad and evil.
There's nothing inherently wrong with partisanship, and nothing inherently good and noble about bipartisanship, the insistence of many in the press notwithstanding. Consider a historic example. John Quincy Adams and Charles Sumner were both die-hard partisans on the slavery issue (among many others) while they were in Congress. I'm sure it won them few friends, but with historical hindsight, would any of us argue that they should not have been that way, and should have been accommodating to proslavery Congressmen in the name of bipartisanship? To cite a more recent example, I am sure that there were a few people (though probably only a few) in the Mississippi Legislature who opposed Gov. Ross Barnet and his extreme stance against integration in the 1960's. Should they have backed off in the name of bipartisanship? Again, I don't think any one nowadays would say so. Don't get me wrong; I'm not opposed to bipartisanship when it is the right thing to do. Sometimes, however, I believe that being a partisan can also be the right thing to do; in fact, it often is. Therefore, I can't share the desire of the reformers to make legislatures as moderate and full of "bridge-builders" as possible. It also needs to be said that partisanship is not some horrid aberration or disease, but is simply the natural result of the fact that two decent and intelligent people can see the same set of facts and come up with different conclusions. Partisanship started with the founders of the nation (such as Hamilton and Jefferson), and is, to use a cliche, as American as apple pie and baseball. Yes, it is unpleasant, and yes, it can be taken to extremes (such as the Clinton impeachment), but that is the way life is in a democracy.