I’ll divert the focus from the international scene for a moment and talk about domestic politics, and an unintended consequence of the information revolution – paralyzed legislative bodies, unable to come to grips with the real issues facing the various states and the nation and exempt from punishment by the electorate. That’s right, unless you are meaningfully accused of murder (Gary Condit), incumbency is essentially considered a property right these days.

There are a number of reasons, and I’ll focus here on one…reapportionment.

Reapportionment is the process whereby districts are drawn for legislators, and what has happened is that old-fashioned gut instinct has been replaced with a level of sophistication and exactitude made possible by computer’s ability to crunch statistics, and by the excellent and readily available sets of statistics on voting behavior by precinct and demographic changes down to the city block level.

This allows sophisticated operatives (and we had among the first here in Los Angeles in the Berman brothers) to design legislative districts with an impossibly high level of assurance on how those districts will vote.

And this means that each vote counts for substantially less, because the contest was pre-selected when the politicians selected their voters, instead of the other way around.

This is going on worldwide right now, as U.S.-style election consultants and electoral techniques spread. A quick Google shows articles from Ireland, Italy, and Greece, as well as the U.K.

Here in California, (thanks to a permalink-less Mickey Kaus – just scroll down to Sunday, May 4 – hey, Mickey, we went high school together!!) California Congressman Devin Nunes is proposing an anti-gerrymandering initiative. Where do I sign up?? I’ll dig in and share the word. You can’t email his office because of the stupid ‘contact your representative online’ system in place, but you can fax him at (559) 733-3865. Other states should follow.
I’ve blogged about this over at Armed Liberal (here and here) and want to bring three great articles up here.

First, in the normally somnolent L.A. Times, in an article titled In California, Politicians Choose–and Voters Lose:

What if the World Series had been played during spring training, the commissioner of baseball having picked the competing teams? Baseball fans would be outraged. Yet something similar has happened to California elections. In the vast majority of legislative and congressional districts, we have no general election contests this fall because the races were decided in the spring primaries. The political stadium is dark.

How many competitive races for the House of Representatives are there in the Southland? None. How many competitive races for the state Senate? None. How many for the Assembly? Two–at most.
…

That’s what a politician likes–the fewer voters, the better, and especially if they are the most partisan ones. Candidates beat their breasts about what hard-core partisans they are, and the tiny number of people who go to the polls respond by electing the most hard-core partisans in both parties.

The result is a largely dysfunctional Legislature. Members chosen in a closed primary, with a minimum of voters participating, come to Sacramento intent on representing the narrow partisan positions that got them there.

Is it any wonder they cannot negotiate a state budget? Passing the budget–it was two months late this year–is the most important and most difficult thing a legislator does because it requires compromise and negotiation. The current system encourages exactly the opposite.

One Republican who might have broken the budget impasse this summer privately told friends, “Look, I can’t afford to cross my primary voters; they demand that I hang tough.” The sentiment was the same on the Democratic side. A look at the shadow Legislature elected in March shows future members will be even more ideologically rigid.

Californians might remember this when they cast their meaningless votes in November for their preordained members of the Legislature–if they bother to vote at all.

And why should we?? I live in a district – CA 36 – which was just ‘adjusted’ to assure a Democratic plurality. In the Democratic primary, my congresswoman, Jane Harman, originally took the seat (after stepping down for a laughable run for Governor) by simply showing up and explaining to the list of local Democratic candidates that she wanted it, and that the national party would support her, so thank you all very much for running.

Dan Polsby had a great interview (tip of the hat to Team Volokh), in which he explains that

he 2002 elections for Congressional Representatives will be the first conducted under the new districts drawn following the 2002 Census. Although important issues are at stake in November, most of the districts’ borders have been gerrymandered so skillfully that the typical race’s outcome is predetermined. Time Magazine estimates that 394 House seats are “safe,” 29 are “almost safe,” and eleven are “toss-ups.” That’s eleven toss-ups out of 435 separate elections.
In contrast, 8 of 34 Senate seats are said to be toss-ups. The Senate is more than ten times more competitive than the House, in large part because Senate races are fought over entire states, which can’t be gerrymandered. With districts, however, by carefully redrawing boundaries, parties can ensure that that most of their incumbents enjoy a comfortable majority.

This is the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended for the House of Representatives. They wanted the House to represent the views of the public by allowing voters to make wholesale changes in their Representatives every two years. The Senate, in contrast, with its staggered six-year terms, was supposed to provide a brake on popular passions.

As some objective evidence, take a look at Nathan Newman, who has a great analysis of increasing deadlock and partisanship in Congress (with a really cool animated .gif); he has some traditional historical explanations, but I suggested that the incumbent-centric gerrymandering above is a huge part of the problem.

This is a bad, bad, thing people…one of the worst U.S. exports, and something we should work hard to stamp out here and abroad. It is one of the main pillars of the SkyBox (what I call the barriers to entry in politics), and has damaged the U.S. badly.