Most Americans, maybe especially most Michiganders, don’t like to see either major political party control things for too long. When one bunch of bums isn’t doing the job, we toss them out and get the other party in for a while.
In fact, much of the time, people really seem to like having divided government, or as one woman once cynically said to me, “I’m more comfortable when we know that one set of thieves is watching the other set of thieves to make sure they don’t steal too much.”
I don’t think of our elected leaders as thieves — most of them, anyway. But I do think we need a level playing field, in which politicians of either party have a chance to win if they have good candidates and sensible positions on the issues. We don’t have that now.
Our legislative and congressional districts are so gerrymandered that not only is the deck heavily stacked in favor of Republicans, most of the Democratic districts are completely one-party districts as well. Where I live, a good, sensible Republican would have virtually no chance running against a bad or incompetent Democrat. But there are far more districts where the opposite is true, where Democrats never have a chance.
And that’s not good for either party, or democracy.
The reason we have this sorry situation is that the legislative boundaries are drawn every ten years by the legislature and approved by the governor.
The last two times this was done, Republicans controlled every branch of state government, and they drew boundaries that were designed to perpetuate that forever, by ensuring there would always be a Republican majority to draw the next set of lines.
For example, in one recent election, more citizens cast votes for Democrats for state senate than for Republicans. Unless this system changes, none of us will ever live to see Democrats gain a majority in that body. And that isn’t good for anyone.
Democrats aren’t saints, of course.
They might well do much the same if they had a majority. Democrats have, in states like Illinois and Maryland where they have legislative majorities. But that’s just as wrong.
The Voters Not Politicians amendment is designed to restore fairness to our elections, by creating a system where any future lines would be drawn by a panel of non-politicians, Democrats, Republicans and independents, most of whom would have to agree on any district.
That would make sure districts were not only more competitive, but sensibly shaped, to group together people who live together and have more or less common interests.
Hamtramck and Keego Harbor have virtually nothing in common, but they’ve been gerrymandered into the same district. Kalamazoo and Battle Creek ought to be in the same congressional district, and were for a long time. But they aren’t any more.
Normally, you have to pay people to collect signatures to get a state constitutional amendment on the ballot. But the citizens are so hungry for reform, unpaid volunteers collected more than enough in very little time. If the Michigan Supreme Court knocks this off the ballot, it would be a travesty of justice, a naked partisan abuse of the people’s faith in the system.
And I don’t know how many more of those we can take.
