The Fighting Fourth

Ah yes, the 4th congressional district, known popularly as The Hairpin.  There is an interesting story behind that.  About thirty years ago it was noticed that although Hispanics made up a high proportion of the population of the state of Illinois, they did not have any congressional districts.  To remedy that the 4th district consisting of Humboldt Park where the Puerto Ricans lived was joined by a thin land bridge to the east to Pilsen where the Mexicans lived and the Hispanic district was created.  This sort of thing was done throughout the country giving Hispanics and Blacks representation equal to their populations.

This was gerrymandering.  One might say, as was the current thought, that it was gerrymandering for a good cause, but gerrymandering nevertheless.  It turned out to be a bad idea.  Where previously Blacks or Hispanics may have had no districts out of say ten, they now had one or two, but the cost of that was that none of the other districts had any Blacks or Hispanics.  In consequence districts that had once had maybe twenty percent minorities now had almost none, so the congressman who had had to pay some attention to minority issues now had no reason to pay any attention to them at all, and since the white districts outnumbered the minority districts, the minorities were left with a spokesman (their representative) but no real power.

That aside the dems are certainly guilty of gerrymandering (notice I am not pretending that I don't know this) but their gerrymandering is basically to help out the current alderman.  Since the city is totally democratic it had no effect on rep vs dem, just which dem.  Now that the state is blue that gerrymandering is statewide, but the fact is that most people in the state vote democratic anyway so it's not like it is stealing the election for either side.

A comparison can be made by noting the total vote of a state, rep and dem. and the proportion of representatives rep and dem elected.  Illinois does indeed elect more dems than the vote would predict, but it is a relatively small number,  It is much different in a slew of other states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina off the top of my head where reps rule in much higher numbers than their overall vote would indicate.

This was a plan ten or twenty years ago when the reps flooded local races with money to take control of the state houses to control the redistricting and went gerrymandering wild.  In case this widely known event has slipped from the consciousness of a member of the Institute, it can be looked up under the name Redmap.

I know that Beagles is just a mild-mannered guy living in a swamp and had no hand in the gerrymandering of his state.  What raised my ire (perhaps too much in the view of Da Scourge, but these are the times of the corona and it takes its toll, particularly on us behaving nicely while watching some of our neighbors behave not so nicely which will bring a resurgence in the plague causing us to suffer home confinement) was not the gerrymandering but Beagles pretending that he didn't know about this headline event taking place right where he lives.

Gentleman the winds from the east have stopped blowing and I enjoyed my first day of the summer reading the paper while my cats sprawled at my feet and the finches buzzed by eyeing their sock of seed which would be theirs once I had finished my paper and begun my painting.  And that is where I hasten this morning.