Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Flake’
Did that headline get your attention? It should have. It’s true, by the way. I’m not pro-illegal alien; I’m pro-freedom, and in the current party philosophy, that makes me a libertarian-Republican. While I have serious concerns with the spending addiction demonstrated by many Republicans over the last 15 years or so, I still believe that the Republican Party is better for America than the Democrat Party.
So, I want what’s good for Republicans, and that means the news that Arizona has seen a drop in illegals by more than 100,000 people is bad news.
Wait, wait… let me explain.
In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act as a part of the legislative push for civil rights. It was intended to make sure states didn’t discriminate against blacks through poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. The federal government determined which states or jurisdictions had a history of such discrimination and essentially took control of the electoral process through a process call “pre-clearance.”
What that means is that if a state makes any kind of change that affects elections, that change must be approved by the U.S. Justice Department. The absurdity of the law, now more than 40 years later, is that a local election panel (in a pre-clearance state) can’t change even a polling site without the Fed’s blessing.
Arizona is a pre-clearance state, purportedly because the state elections process at some point discriminated against Native Americans.
The biggest impact pre-clearance has in Arizona is on redistricting. Before any new boundaries go into effect, the Justice Department must approve.
Without getting into the nitty gritty of the legal jargon and process, the way that this works in Arizona is that districts (both Congressional and Legislative) currently represented by a minority are protected to maintain their “majority-minority” status. That is, the majority of voters in that district must be minorities, which in this day and age is mostly Hispanic.
For example, during the 2001 redistricting process, the first Congressional district drawn was Rep. Ed Pastor’s, because it needed to have a sufficient number of Hispanics in order to pass DOJ muster. Because Hispanics have low turnout in elections compared to others, Pastor’s district had to be “packed” with a larger number of Democrat voters to “ensure” he could be re-elected.
The 2001 redistricting produced two new Congressional districts as a result of population growth. One of the new districts was a majority-minority district in Southwestern Arizona, which Raul Grijalva won. The other was the creation the sprawling 1st Congressional District, originally won by Rick Renzi.
So, what does this have to do with illegals fleeing the state being bad for the GOP?
According to a number of reports, the number of illegal aliens in Arizona is down more than 100,000 in the past year or so. Until last year, it was conventional wisdom that the next census would result in Arizona again gaining two Congressional seats. But with a loss of 100,000 people (yes, the census counts illegals, the census is not a count of citizens; it is a count of people – it’s plainly in the Constitution), Arizona is likely to only gain one Congressional seat.
Because of the need to protect Pastor and Grijalva in the newly-drawn districts, the majority of the Hispanic population would be gerrymandered into one of those two districts, leaving too few minorities to populate a third majority-minority district.
Which means that Republicans, who could have added two seats to their delegation, can only add one. As a Republican, that frustrates me, particularly as we go into a couple of election cycles that will be very good for Republicans. Democrats already hold three seats that should be Republican (CD1, CD5 and CD8), and there is a good chance that all three will be recaptured by Republicans this fall. With Congressmen Jeff Flake and Trent Franks running for reelection, and since CD3 will certainly stay Republican, the shift in the Arizona delegation could go from three Republicans and five Democrats to six Republicans and two Democrats.
If we had those 100,000 illegals back, 2012 could see an 8-2 GOP-Dem delegation.
That’s pro-Republican and pro-Freedom.
