Speaker 1: if you've been watching the show for a while or if you're just aware of the
American system of government more generally, then you'll know what gerrymandering is.
Very simply, it's when state legislatures draw up district maps in a way that will benefit them.
The party that's already in control gets to do this, so it's effectively a way for politicians
to choose their voter. Rather than voters choosing their politicians. So, for example,
if you're a Republican state, but you have a big Democratic city in the state and let's say you're
awarded five districts from the census that gets done every ten years, you may decide to make the
city one district with the more rural areas for separate districts. So then you'll have a
4 to 1 advantage. Or if you can get away with it, maybe you'll break up that city into five pieces,
combining those pieces with the more rural areas that may outweigh the parts of the
city in population. So then you can get a 5 to 0 advantage. That's kind of how it works. It's a
practice that really has to be done away with, and there are laws against going too far with it, like
by breaking up districts by ethnic neighborhoods. You can't you can't do too much with that. These
districts have to be contiguous. But the states over the years have been able to get away with
quite a lot as it pertains to redistricting. Like, for example, let's take a look at this map.
Here is a picture of Dan Crenshaw's oddly shaped district in the Houston area. It looks like maybe
a salamander, if you can say that it resembles anything at all. So this is some pretty extreme
gerrymandering here. Well, every now and then, the courts will step in and strike down one of
these egregiously gerrymandered maps, which is good to see, because that means that there's
some accountability at least. But the problem is that it's often too little, too late. And we may
go through an election cycle or two or three or four before these illegally drawn districts
can be corrected. And that's exactly the situation that we're finding ourselves in now going into the
2022 midterms. Since January, district maps in the Republican controlled states of Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana and Ohio have been deemed unlawful. But rather than putting in an immediate stop to it,
they've been allowed to go forward for this election cycle. The states are challenging
the respective judge's rulings, and the plan is to just figure it all out later. And it's not an
insignificant number of seats, too. It's about 10% of seats in the House of Representatives that are
affected by this ruling. And it's going to end up awarding Republicans about 5 to 7 seats that they
otherwise wouldn't be able to win. They're just going to be essentially entitled to these seats.
Keep in mind, Republicans only need to pick up about ten seats or even fewer potentially to win
back the House in 2022. So this is definitely the type of thing that we need emergency relief on,
right? We need the Supreme Court to step in and say, no, you can't use these maps. They've been
determined to be illegal and you can't use it for the midterms. But predictably, they're quite
laxed on this issue. The Supreme Court is very conservative right now, 6 to 3 conservative.
And this is the type of ruling that's going to benefit them and their political side in the
meantime. So they're happy to see it be allowed to be used because they know that it's going to
increase their power. So they're totally fine with it. They're not going to step in. And it's
yet another example of the 2016 election rearing its ugly head and how Donald Trump, being able to
appoint those three Supreme Court justices has put us in a terrible position as a country. And it's
also part of the reason why FiveThirtyEight right now expects that Republicans have about a 79 80%
chance of winning back the lower chamber in 2022. Sure, it's not just this issue,
it's other things, too. Like we probably should have picked up more seats in the House in 2020.
There's also the historical trend of how the party in charge that has the White House tends to have a
bad first midterm. So there's other things working against us. Sure. But also, gerrymandering plays
a significant role. And it's really something that we cannot have in a functioning democracy,
something that we have to work on and we have to fix this process or at least have
a way to undo these maps immediately when they're determined to be illegal. All right. That's going
to do it for today's episode of The David Pakman Show. My thank you to David for allowing me to
fill in today as he is up in Canada at the moment. Have a great weekend, everybody. And I'm going to
be back on Monday hosting once again. Speaker 6: See you then.