No Taxation Without Representation Redux

The slogan "No Taxation Without Representation" summarized a primary grievance of the American colonists during the 1750s and 1760s and was one of the major causes of the 1776 revolution. The lack of representation was more obvious 242 years ago but it is nevertheless true today. Modern Americans suffer the same plight due to extreme partisan gerrymandering.

When voters aren’t able to choose their representation fairly it’s the same as not being represented at all so they are taxed without representation. In addition many of their other concerns are left unmet or even opposed unjustly.

Texas is a prime example of gerrymandering, our state has 36 congressional districts. In the 2016 election the vote split for president was approximately 55% to 45% so you’d expect that Republicans would hold about 20 seats and Democrats 16 but our state is gerrymandered such that Republicans hold 25 seats and Democrats 11. Numerous other states suffer similar unsupportable distribution of seats for the same reason.

Elected officials drawing the district maps use sophisticated analysis to create districts that favor one party or another. Packing refers to drawing districts in such a way as to maximize the number of disfavored voters in the fewest possible districts. Cracking refers to a technique that splits disfavored groups of voters into districts with majorities of the favored party’s voters so that they’re unable to amass a majority in any district therefore blocking them from selecting a representative of their choice. Both techniques are outlawed by the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and a number of states and smaller jurisdictions including Texas were once required to get approval from the Justice Department before finalizing redistricting due to prior bad behavior. Unfortunately the Supreme Court overturned Section IV of the VRA which covered pre-clearance in 2013 and parties in power in many states let fly with bad behavior that had previously not been permitted.

Last summer a three-judge panel of a federal district court ruled 2-1 that the drawing of two Texas congressional districts, the 27th and 35th, violated both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. The panel issued a similar ruling on maps for the Texas state House of Representatives. In early September the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling issued a stay of the order which means that this year we’ll again use the unconstitutional maps for our elections.

The Supreme Court currently has three gerrymandering cases from Wisconsin, North Carolina and Maryland before it. In the case of Maryland it’s the Democrats playing dirty. We can expect decisions in these cases by the end of the current term this summer.

Even if the Supreme Court rules against the states which have gerrymandered districts the ruling won’t have any effect until 2020 and by then many voters will have gone nearly a decade without fair representation. Worse yet, unless the court invokes a portion of Section 2 of the VRA known as bail in, which would require offending jurisdictions to once again submit redistricting for pre-clearance, we’ll just go through the same decade long legal stand-off all over again after the 2020 census invokes redistricting in 2021.

There is a solution to all this, Texas could follow Austin’s lead and create a citizens redistricting commission which would be tasked with creating fair district maps without regard to partisanship. Common Cause Texas proposed such a bill last session and it was filed by Representative Victoria Neave but the Redistricting Committee chair failed to even call a meeting the committee so neither it nor any other proposal even got a hearing. Hopefully the Texas legislature does better in 2019.

Wealthy Use Law to Maintain Their Wealth

Anti-drug laws, voter suppression and gerrymandering, and tax policy are all used by the wealthiest among us to maintain a fractured society. It’s in their interest to keep us at each other’s throats so we don’t turn our attention to their hoarding of assets and work together to develop a more equal and just society.

Using wedges to keep people with common interests separated has been a trait of the wealthy here since colonial times when plantation owners noticed that indentured servants were fraternizing with and sometimes escaping with slaves or running off to live with the Indians. In order to stop losing their enslaved workers the planters developed programs for the indentured servants wherein they would receive what was essentially a large bonus at the end of their servitude, assuming they lived through it. In addition they were made the supervisors of the black slaves and given the privilege of beating and otherwise abusing them.

Anti-drug laws such as the prohibition against marijuana were created expressly to enable the arrest and prosecution of black members of society since at the time of inception it was preferred over liquor and beer due to being cheaper because they could grow their own. The use of anti-drug laws has continued to be used for control as explained by former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman who was quoted in Harper’s magazine saying "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people, you understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Until the Voting Rights Act poll taxes and literacy tests were used to prevent “undesirables” so that the wealthy could continue to prosper at the expense of the lower classes. Now laws like Texas’ Voter ID bill seek to suppress the vote by only allowing forms of ID that tend to be held by wealthier white voters and not by poorer voters of color. Gerrymandering is used to prevent voters of color from electing officials who might be more sympathetic to their plight. Here again Texas is a prime example with a federal judge having found that the 2011 redistricting maps were intentionally discriminatory against voters of color.

Just look at Texas tax policy and the funding of public education. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick claims that property taxes are too high and he wants to set a maximum that cities and school districts can charge. Ironically he’s been instrumental in reducing the share of public school funding provided by the state thus requiring school districts to raise property taxes in order to provide an adequate education. The way this hurts people of color is that their school districts generally have overall lower property values so even if they could afford to raise the tax rates they’d still have less money to spend on educating children in their districts. Most of us would be very angry if our tax deduction for mortgage interest went away so it won’t but the people who get the greatest advantage out of it are the very wealthiest who buy multi-million dollar homes.

Nearly 400 years later and the wealthy still lead us by the nose.

Published in the Seguin Gazette July 14, 2017