Robert Scheer says that gerrymandering congressional districts to make them uncomeptitive is a good thing, because it makes politicians more answerable to their constituents. Scheer’s theory, I guess, is that lobbyists won’t spend money trying to influence uncompetitive elections.

This, friends, is campaign finance reform taken to its logical, completely loony conclusion. Once reform activists realize that so long as there are competitive elections there will always be money around to influence them, no matter what laws they pass, they’ll simply advocate an end to competitive elections.

I’ll do Scheer one better. If gerrymandering districts to ensure incumbent reelection is the key to ridding politics of corruption (I can’t believe I just typed those words in that order), why not remove all doubt?

I say we do away with elections completely. Let’s just appoint each congressman to a life term!

NOTE: I forgot to provide the link when first posting this. It’s here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 10:49 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.