Matt Wuerker for February 26, 2013
Transcript:
Creatures of Washington. The Gerrymander. The gerrymander's a slimy beast with a wily imagination. Aiming for every seat, he's tough to beat hijacking legislation. If you've cash to buy a state house he'll throw this game so cryptic. The results he can rig, your future's big when he redraws your district. Incumbency's reserved by his partisan pencil that draws districts wildly distorted. The status quo stays inbred by lines so skewed the government gets much contorted.
Gerrymander is not illegal. It’s the outcomes that may be. Alabama is trying to get out from under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, saying it is no longer relevant. Meanwhile, Texas bowed to Tom DeLay and redistricted mid-census, which had never been done before. Now they are being sued because the CURRENT redistricting sliced the Latino population into segments so that Republicans still held a majority in most districts. Where that couldn’t be done, they threw them all into heavily Latino districts where Dems would have to run against one another.