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People in glass houses....

The USA is forever lecturing the world about freedom, democracy, having a proper judicial process in place, a free press, etc. etc.     All well and good and most laudable - except that there is a missing part of democracy alive and well in America itself.    People in glass houses?

Paul McGeough, writing for the SMH, reveals how America's electoral boundaries are manipulated.

"Go anywhere in the world these days and the voice of the US is heard - urging, cajoling or sanctioning in the name of freedom and human rights.

It might be a big gun, like Hillary Clinton in Burma, or a tut-tutting editorial in The Washington Post. But Libyans and Egyptians, Iranians and Syrians all get the Washington low-down on the essentials of democracy.

Funny then, that back home American politicians are engaging in a once-in-a-decade circus that is contemptuous of the democratic fundamentals - the rorting of electoral boundaries.

In much of the US, it is the politicians who get to draw lines on maps - not independent judicial or quasi-judicial bodies such as those entrusted with this task in Australia and elsewhere in the developed world.

Instead of voters choosing their congressmen, this is when members of Congress choose their voters. In a few states, sitting members have actually retained the services of much-maligned lobbyists to push their bids for electoral survival and party chiefs have multimillion-dollar budgets for challenges in more than a dozen states.

In states that account for slightly more than half of the 435 electoral districts in Congress, the political party in power at the state level has exclusive control of the process. After the Republican tsunami in last year's midterm elections, that means Republicans call the shots on the shape of 202 districts ahead of an election next year, and the Democrats in just 47 districts.

But weep for voters, not the Democrats. When the Democrats have been up in the polls, they have wielded the scalpel with the same savage self-interest that drives this year's Republican-controlled redistricting committees.

The result is an absurd, partisan twisting and bending of electoral boundaries, to shore up sitting colleagues and, at the same time, to expose congressmen from the other side to defeat."


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