Proposition 4 proves the point.
Sanctioning abject gerrymandering is bad law, unfair to the citizenry, and an affront to notions such as government by the people.
Republicans, even the MAGA populists affiliated with the party in name only, know this, I think, those actual RINOs. But then, they do not appear to understand Republicanism or conservatism anymore, since they follow neither. In this they share something with Democratic populists reaching for whatever rhetoric sounds handy for power.
Shaping legislative districts becomes paramount for partisans who have lost their way. The instinct among those in political power runs exactly the same. Any trick to hold on.
Republicans in Utah, Texas, North Carolina. Democrats in California, New York, Illinois.
Of course, we’re concerned here with here, Utah, and the supermajority Legislature most prominently wanting to keep drawing the congressional boundaries for all red districts. Which is only natural, but let’s not mistake this for any wish to put the constituents, those saps, first, second or third.
The statewide citizen Proposition 4 in 2018 set up a nonpartisan commission that drew up districts that include more liberal Salt Lake City in a district favoring the majority of Democratic voters there.
The practical difference is between all five congressional districts favoring Republicans, as the Legislature would draw the lines neatly cutting out a district’s worth of blue voters, and one Democratic-leaning district among the five as more naturally fits the population there.
It’s a neat little inverse of the districting of Summit County that the Legislature imposed using some rhetoric of fairness that residents of the county never sought, and then no Republicans chose to compete in any of the districts. Summit is a blue-majority county. Neighboring Wasatch County, a red one, was specifically excused from all this “fairness.”
There has been a fistful of ironies, as usual when cloaking reality with platitudes; that is, propaganda. In this case GOP leaders citing the danger of out-of-state influence, and of paying out of state organizations to collect petition signatures. All of which the Republicans eagerly did with perfectly straight faces in their effort to petition for a referendum to overturn Prop 4 and restore all control to the Legislature.
It wasn’t long ago legislative and party leaders were decrying measures to make referendums easier to get on the statewide ballot, scaring up images of California and Colorado’s crazy quilts of overlapping laws by citizen initiative that make no real sense, and lawyers rich. I agree wholeheartedly with them on that point, having lived in those states.
It was quite right for the anti-Prop 4 petition drive to die this spring as it should, then. This after Republicans pulled out all the stops they previously decried.
I’ve come to understand political hypocrisy in the quest for power to just be the air we breathe today. That includes hijacking rhetoric such as “fairness,” “honesty,” and that whole litany of words that by their use signal that the politicos don’t concern themselves with any of them other than as code for something else.
Of course, this is too bad. Nothing is sacred — not words, not legislative boundaries to represent voters.
The propaganda is such that it’s almost a refreshing whiff of honesty when the Department of Defense is renamed the Department of War.
That’s perhaps an appalling turn for America, another twist away from the Founding Fathers recast as if in their name. But for now at least, it’s a truer label in an era running in a reality most emblematic of the sitting president’s messianic AI image.
Call me crazy, but wouldn’t we all be better off if districts were cut to rectangles among like populations instead of starfish reaching for political advantage? It’s such a small thing. But it would be a good start if Prop 4 holds.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.