(10-04-2017 03:57 PM)NewTimes Wrote:  If there has ever been a better time for a) one to be an independent or b) a 3rd major political party it's now. The discontent with our political system is the greatest in my lifetime. And it's not just presidential candidates. What happens to local elected officials when they become a part of the system? Those newbies who rail against the establishment more than often become the new establishment. Why does every decision and action be along party lines? Why was the vote for ACA only passed solely by Democrats and the recent failure of the GOP to appeal it only along party lines? What happened when a few Democrats could support GOP legislation and a few Republicans support a Democratic bill?

This did. All in all, it's a good thing.

(10-05-2017 07:37 AM)JustAnotherAustinOwl Wrote:  I tend to think term limits won't solve the problems people think they will without electoral reform - too many non-competitive electoral districts - and if we reform elections to make most districts at least somewhat competitive (or go to some sort of proportional representation) then more people will be term limited by the voters voting them out....

Curious what the SC is going to decide on partisan gerrymandering.

Probably nothing. The problem one always runs into when trying to decide this question is how much gerrymandering is too much gerrymandering. It's impossible to come up with a perfectly objective system for re-districting, because constraints always must be put on the process, and those constraints are determined subjectively. If it's inevitable that some subjectivity is going to be in the system, then how does one determine how much is too much? Such a determination itself is subjective. The courts in the past have given great deference to the legislative branch for this reason, and I suspect the Supreme Court will do so in this case as well.

In any event, it may not matter. I read of a study by a political scientist at Michigan who wanted to see how the recent U. S. House of Representatives elections would have turned out under a putatively objective redistricting scheme. He took the voting results for every precinct in the United States, re-arranged them into congressional districts determined by one of the popular algorithm-driven district maps, and then apportioned the vote by party from the precinct data as per the new districts and determined how many representatives each party would get. He found that the Democrats would have gained a grand total of two seats from their actual 2016 results. A deeper look at the data revealed why there would've been so little change. The Democratic Party today has become a party almost exclusively of racial minorities and white urban elitists, and these groups tend to cluster disproportionately in cities (the latter group by definition). They live in geographically compact areas, so the end result of any algorithm that seeks to create districts as geographically-compact as possible will necessarily pack a lot of Democrats into urban districts, because that's where they live, leaving a lot of Republican suburban, exurban, and rural districts. The issue is not the politicians gerrymandering districts; it's that the voters are gerrymandering themselves.