Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 12, 1994 TAG: 9402150271
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Before, the state had been seen as a collection of separate estates: the rulers, the aristocracy and the people. Politics was seen as the interplay among the three separate groups, as each attempted to preserve its own prerogatives and force the other two to fulfill their obligations.
In the new view as it evolved among the American colonists and revolutionaries, the state became estate-less. Their view was of the state as a vehicle for furthering the common good above individual interest, as a republic in which the rulers were of the people, elected by and representing them in that furtherance.
The new view soon had to be modified. The rise of what the founding generation called "factions," what today are called "interests," proved unavoidable, as did the tendency of citizens to interpret the public good in terms of their own individual advancement. The system of small republics in loose confederation proved unworkable. (It was James Madison who saw, in "The Federalist Papers," a beneficial connection. The larger the republic, the greater the number of factions. The greater the number of factions, the better to hold any single faction in check.)
Yet in other respects, the Revolutionary ideal endures. The concepts of community, of the existence of a general public interest, are not dead. Neither is the principle that rulers are not an estate unto themselves, but rather the temporary representatives of the public that elected them.
It's a principle, however, that gets put to the test - and, unfortunately, usually fails - when the Virginia General Assembly redistricts itself every decade. The lawmakers are constrained by the courts' insistence on the one-man, one-vote rule of districts of equal population, and this helps. But aided now by number-crunching computers, gerrymandering in the interests of incumbent protection and (especially after the 1990 Census) partisan advantage has become grotesquely blatant.
Aside from federal constitutional and voting-rights requirements, redistricting is exclusively in the hands of those least likely to have an objective attitude: legislators of the majority party. Heretofore, that has been the Democratic Party, but the Republicans are drawing close and could have a majority in one or both houses by the year 2000. Among the unpleasant results of self-interested redistricting: a 1981 remap so bad that it was rejected by the courts and required House of Delegates elections three years in a row, and the 1991 remap that splintered districts represented by Republicans in a vain - even, it could be argued, counterproductive - effort to maintain Democratic hegemony.
Not all states do it Virginia's way. For years, former GOP Del. Steve Agee of Salem crusaded for establishment of the kind of nonpartisan redistricting commission that a number of other states use. Some alternative systems work better than others, of course, but it would be hard to find one worse than how it's done in the Old Dominion.
If Virginia is to have good redistricting after the 2000 Census - redistricting, that is, which stresses compactness and community of interest rather than partisanship and incumbent protection - the time to start examining prospective alternatives is now, so one can be in place by then. With the parties at near-equal strength in both the state Senate and the House, you'd think that non-partisan redistricting would attract more interest than when one or the other party is clearly dominant.
But that doesn't seem the case. Maybe state lawmakers think nobody cares. Maybe they think redistricting is an insider's issue, of minor moment to the general public.
Not true. When legislative-district lines are redrawn to help those in power stay in power, rather than help decide fairly who should be in power, it is more than an insider's squabble. It contributes to the separation of ruler from ruled, and mocks the idea that, in America, the former are simply agents of the latter.
\ Sunday: Making politics user-friendly.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB