- Allison Shelley/Getty Images
- Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens, the retired Republican Supreme Court Justice who’s remembered as a liberal because the Court turned so conservative while he was on it, has written a book proposing changes to the U.S. Constitution. One would eliminate political gerrymandering, which Stevens, like so many others, regards as a bad thing. He wants the Constitution to demand “compact” districts “composed of contiguous territory”; exceptions could not be made if the reason for them were “enhancing or preserving the political power of the party in control of the state government.”
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, addressed gerrymandering last year in a long article in the Columbia Law Review. “The most glaring problem with gerrymandering—the problem that spawned the term two centuries ago—is the partisan havoc that it may wreak,” he wrote. “Clever district configurations may give rise to legislatures whose composition diverges sharply from the will of a majority of voters.” Stephanopoulas noted that Justice Stevens, dissenting in a gerrymandering case, observed that Texas’s Democrats could have won a majority of the statewide vote and yet captured only 12 of that state’s 32 congressional seats.
Another problem with gerrymandering was promptly identified by a reader responding to my first post: “Here in Austin, Texas, America’s boomtown with a metro population about to rocket past 2,000,000, we have no congressional seats. Zero. The city is split several ways into districts sprawling across Texas, essentially to disenfranchise Austin (and similarly San Antonio).”
