When reduced to its essence, the present arguments over congressional redistricting, as evidenced by court cases presently in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, expose the stark reality that the Left simply does not like our form of government, or even what our founding documents considered the very purpose of government.
The Supreme Court has taken cases involving the drawing of legislative district lines in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Within the past several months, various courts have ruled against redistricting plans of Republicans in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Think Progress, a strongly left-wing website, devoted an article this week to this issue, revealing why progressives on the Left are so active in redistricting questions. Put bluntly, they want the Democrats to win more seats in Congress and in the various state legislatures, and they desire to alter our form of government, transforming us from a federal republic into a unitary democracy.
According to Think Progress in a March 26 article, “A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice [a left-wing think tank] suggests that congressional races” are “heavily rigged in favor of Republicans.” What do they mean by “rigged”? “The upshot of their analysis is that, to win a bare majority of the seats in the U.S. House,” Democrats “would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points.”
Of course, members of the House of Representatives are not chosen by a “national popular vote.” But, as we have predicted in past articles, while many have focused on the “national popular vote” in the presidential race, with many, mostly on the Left, arguing that the Electoral College system is “undemocratic,” the reality is that progressives do not like our system of choosing members of the House and Senate, either.
Progressives at least as far back as then-Princeton Professor Woodrow Wilson have expressed disgust at the legislative system as it was established in our Constitution, arguing that a parliamentary system such as that used in the United Kingdom would be superior. Today, arguments about the “national popular vote,” as made by Think Progress‚ illustrate that a move is being made for the Supreme Court to declare the system created by the constitutional framers to be unconstitutional, as contradictory as that is.
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In the United States, we use “single-member districts.” This means that the national vote has no impact on what a specific congressional district decides. The voters in the fourth congressional district of Oklahoma determine what person will represent them in the House of Representatives, and the voters in a district in San Francisco choose to elect Nancy Pelosi. Each district’s vote has no bearing on the outcome of the other’s election. A person is elected to represent the people of his or her district, not the country as a whole, and certainly not a particular political party.
Yet, Think Progress clearly laments that the national popular vote does not determine the party make-up of Congress. For example, they note, “In 2017, when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to occupy this seat, the 45 senators who opposed his confirmation represented more than 25 million more people than the senators who opposed him.”
This remark demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Left. The very reason that the increasingly partisan bickering over Supreme Court nominees is so intense is that everyone realizes that the political ideology, not the law or the Constitution, often guides the rulings of members of the federal courts. This supposed dedication by progressives to letting the will of the people prevail is easily contradicted by the following example: The voters in California adopted Proposition Eight, which held that marriage in the state was between one man and one woman, yet the Left hailed the decision of federal courts to overturn the will of that state’s voters. In other words, the will of the majority is great, just as long as it reflects the will of the Left.
Think Progress ended its article lamenting, “The United States … is barreling toward a future where a younger, multicultural, more urbanized majority is ruled by an aging, white, rural minority. That’s a recipe for civil unrest.”
Really? But courts overturning the will of the majority in cases such as the striking down of Proposition Eight in California does not contribute to civil unrest?
The problem that the Left has is that “their” voters are concentrated in urban areas. This leads to a situation in which a liberal candidate gets 80 or 90 percent of the vote, while in a rural district the numbers are usually much more competitive. They argue that these surplus vote margins they run up in urban areas are “wasted” votes.
Of course, the only “solution” to this supposed problem is to abandon the federal system created by our Founders, replacing it with a parliamentary democracy with a unitary centralized governmental system as in the United Kingdom. The United States was created as a military coalition of separate, independent states against that very centralized form of government of the United Kingdom, which was dictating to them as to what to do on local matters.
Finally, those on the Left, such as Think Progress, clearly have a concept of government that contradicts that of the Founders. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said that a nation’s just powers involved protecting our inalienable rights. Whether it is with the election of the president through an electoral vote system, or the election of members of the House of Representatives though a single-member district system, or the election of members of the U.S. Senate through an election confined to voters in that state, the purpose of government is to protect our life, our property, and our liberty.
To the progressive, however, the purpose of government is to make sure the will of the majority prevails. In other words, let the mob rule. If the purpose of government is indeed to simply make sure the will of the majority prevails and is not to make our lives, liberty, and property secure, then we do not need a Constitution, courts, and rights. A simple majority vote can separate us from our property, our liberty, or our very lives.
