Democrats in Virginia are working hard to skew the congressional districts map in their favor, and on today’s edition of The Editors, Charlie looks at the coverage.
“Gerrymandering is predominantly a state political issue,” Charlie says. “That is to say, it is nonjusticiable in most cases. It is an entirely grubby, self-serving, hardball endeavor. Politicians do it because they wish to give themselves and their parties an advantage. Let’s acknowledge that.”
He points to Indiana and Texas, both Republican-majority states, and says, “There’s nothing virtuous about Indiana declining to do it. It means that when Texas did it, it was doing so to increase the prospects of the incumbent party in Texas, not for some higher or noble cause.”
“The press,” in Charlie’s view, “has committed two great sins here. . . . The first one is to have treated Texas’s gerrymandering in a different tone than it has treated Maryland and Virginia. . . . The second mistake that I think the press has made in covering this is focusing too much on Texas as the supposed impetus for what has happened here on the Democratic side.”
Charlie explains that “gerrymandering has obtained since the beginning of the Republic,” and that “the Democrats are already very good at this. They are already ruthless. They did not respond to Texas.”
“I’m not outraged about the Democrats doing this or about the Republicans doing this because this is what politicians do,” Charlie says. “I am absolutely open to a genuine solution where both sides disarm, but it can’t only be on one side, and it can’t be treated as good in one circumstance and bad in another.”
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