REDMAP to AmericanMap

Sure, we won 40 seats in the House, and took back leadership. But we had to out-perform the Republicans by 9% nationally, the widest margin between the two parties since the ‘50s, to do that. The Republican REDMAP program that gerrymandered state after state into unrepresentative majority-Republican House delegations after the 2010 cycle, has made House of Representative elections in the majority of states no longer, well, representative.

We can fix that. But not the way Pelosi has proposed.

Let me explain.

That HR.1 bill, the “For The People Act of 2019” that Pelosi opened the 116^th Congress with? It’s crap.

Sure, it’s a statement of principles of the Democratic Party. If it became law, it would give all citizens access to the ballot box, it would clean up campaign financing, replace gerrymandering, do lots of other stuff to undo what the Republicans have been doing to suppress the non-Republican vote across our country.

If it became law.

But it can’t.

It won’t even get introduced in the Senate, and it certainly wouldn’t get signed by Mango Mussolini.

So let’s actually fight fire with fire.

The Supreme Court allowed Tom Delay to redistrict Texas between censuses, because there’s nothing in the Constitution that said he can’t.

McConnell held open the Supreme Court seat left by Scalia’s death, until at least the next presidential election. He threatened to hold it open until a Republican was elected. Nothing in the Constitution said when the Senate had to advise and consent.

OK, let’s screw them with the same tool.

I’m going to refer to two documents. (Lawyers, watch the layman commit the opening foul.) The first is the Constitution. (There’s the foul. That’s not the law, the law is complicated, etc...citizens always quote the Constitution when they don’t know the law…)

Which is why the second document is at this link, from the Congressional Research Service.

In the US Constitution, Article I defines our Legislature, the Congress.  Section 4 of that Article says that each states’ legislature may prescribe the time, place and manner of holding elections for members to these houses of Congress, but that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations”. 

But again, that’s Congress, both houses, passing a law. Which isn’t going to happen while the Republicans hold the Senate, and Papaya Pinochet is in the Oval Office.

Maybe Pelosi is trying to show that she gave the Republicans a chance to see the error, the un-American-ness, the evil of their ways, by introducing HR. 1.

But they won’t.

And that’s where Section 5 of that Article comes in.

Section 5 opens with this: “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members”.

Now, there’s been some case law, Supreme Court rulings, that qualifications cannot be added to those already in the Constitution. The Senate cannot say that members must be left-handed, for example.

But, as noted in that CRS report, in the same ruling, Powell V. McCormack, (1969), “the Court noted that anyone meeting those qualifications would have to be seated, and not excluded, if such person were "duly" elected”.

So each house of Congress has explicitly reserved to itself, by the Constitution, the ability to judge the elections of those otherwise-qualified persons.

Such as, are the districts of the Representatives, uh, representative?

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve read the facts on how tilted the gerrymandering is in Wisconsin, in North Carolina, in Ohio. Even when Democrats out-vote the Republicans by five to eight percent, the House delegation is often two-thirds Republican. That is an insult to the very name of the House of Representatives.

So let’s change that.

The Democratically-controlled House should institute a rule that members must be elected from districts that are drawn, not by the partisan legislature of the states, but by independent, non-partisan commissions. It’s actually (almost) that simple.

This rule could specify that this would apply to all House elections starting with the November 2020 election cycle. A year and a half is time to get this done, especially if the rule includes that NO member of a delegation elected any other way will be seated. Not a Democrat, not a Republican, no member.

Since the same Article I, Section 5, paragraph 1 continues, “a majority of each [House] shall constitute a quorum to do business”, so if the Texas delegation wasn’t seated, or even most of the South, a majority of those deemed elected is enough to do the nation’s business.

Several states already have these types of commissions to draw House districts. More were proposed, and passed, in the 2018 elections. And back in 2015, Republicans tried, as usual, to overturn the will of the citizens about this, but in "ARIZONASTATE LEGISLATURE v. ARIZONA INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMMISSION ET AL" the Supreme Court pronounced these commissions constitutional.

So there we are. These non-partisan, independent commissions are constitutional alternatives to the partisan state legislatures drawing the districts. The US House has an explicit power to judge the validity of elections of its members. While the language of Article I, granting this authority, makes it unnecessary, the Supreme Court confirmed this in Roudebush v. Hartke (1972), described in the CRS report as affirming “the constitutional authority for "an independent evaluation by the Senate" of the selection of those presenting themselves for membership.” And the Constitution provides the same authority of each house over itself. If it’s OK for the Senate, it applies to the House, too.

Earlier, I said this was actually (almost) that simple.

Here’s the ‘almost’.

There’s a structural difference between the Senate and the House. Because only a third of the Senate, 33 or 34 Senators, stand for election each cycle, the rest of the Senators are still senators, so the Senate still exists as a legislative body. A “continuing body”.

The House is not a continuing body. Regardless of the high incidence of incumbency, every member has to run for election every two years. And since all the members’ terms expire every two years, mechanically, for a brief moment every two years, the House, as a legislative body, ends.

It is not a continuing body.

So the rules made in one session of the House do not necessarily apply to the next. This rule I’m suggesting would have to be immediately reinstated in the opening Rules package of the next, 117^th Congress, just as the new leadership of the House has passed a new Rules package describing how the House will be run during this 116^th session.

So for this to work, we’d have to hold onto the House. We’d have to over-perform the Republicans by eight or nine percent again, nationwide, to hold onto it.

We have a high probability of successfully defending it in 2020, especially if PussyGrabber tops the Republican ticket again. We might even get a majority in the Senate, as well as the White House.

But showing our hand, by putting this announcement on the House floor, will energize every Republican candidate and officeholder, and all of their billionaire donors. The money and vitriol will flow like the Great Flood, trying again, as in the 2010 REDMAP, to sweep the last vestiges of fair elections from the face of this country. Especially since 2020 is another Census year, and which states, and their legislatures, get how many House seats will be determined by that Census. And that will determine the future of our country.

You up for the fight?

I am.