After the Constitutional Convention of 1789, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Republic is Latin for government by the people (res publicus). We associate it with democracy where all decisions would be made directly by the population. Direct democracy has not proven workable at larger groups than a town meeting. Anyone who has served on any type of board or congress knows that the time needed to come to a consensus is proportional to not the number of people present, but at least the square of the number — if not the factorial. Republic usually means representative democracy.
When the Founding Fathers designed Congress, they created two houses so one could be relatively small, intimate and self-disciplined: two Senators per state, total 26. Robert’s rules of order were more than 100 years away. The house was designed to be more proportional, starting with up to 10 representatives per state for an initial total of 65. The larger number could spawn more new ideas. Today these have both grown so large as to be unmanageable: 100 senators and 435 representatives. Even subcommittees are larger than the Senate was then. Yet we still function after 237 years.
The biggest threat is not external attack; it is erosion of proportional representation. The founders took a terrible chance when they fixed the Senate to two per state, an often-criticized arrangement that has prevented a handful of large states from bullying a majority of small ones. Even so, 11 large states could pick a President without a single vote in the other 39!
The great threat is Gerrymandering: the process of drawing boundaries in such a way as to have a minority of voters pick a majority of representatives. The concept is named for Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, who signed a bill in 1812 that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party, today’s Democrats. One of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a mythological salamander. Redistricting had a long history before that of rotten-boroughs and hollow-towns with no residents but legacy representation in legislatures or parliaments.
Some of today’s Gerrymandered districts are even more bizarre, consisting of two or more irregular shapes with a long connection often passing though uninhabited territory, like an interstate highway or river, connecting two populations expected to vote predictably. The districts in most states are designed by the current majority party in the Legislature and carefully drafted, sometimes voter by voter, to ensure their majority in the legislature, Congress and even the U.S. Senate will be their party even if they lose a majority of the electorate. In California, when the two parties were sort of balanced, the districts looked like they were designed to protect incumbents rather than to benefit one party.
The people are getting disgusted with this. Three more states voted to put the redistricting in the hands of a nonpartisan commission of some kind, as Hawaii does. The last redistricting here went pretty well — except for Honolulu County, which already dominates the Legislature, fighting to count temporary military personnel passing through as residents. There was one controversy in Hawaii County where a district line appeared to deviate around one person so his residence would stay in the district that had elected him, until next election.
Maybe the Supreme Court could impose a geometric restriction to insure compactness and discourage bizarre boundaries. A better idea would be computer algorithm like those that figure out how to get the maximum number of parts from a given size sheet. The algorithm would only have non-political input. The locations of all the people superimposed on a map of the state, with each person represented as just a dot. With no information about the individual people, the computer would not be able to use that prejudice, unlike humans who come with built-in preferences.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a semi-monthly column for West Hawaii Today. Email obenskik@gmail.com.