Why So Vicious?

Sorry for the late post today. I was out until 3AM watching my wife sing Poison to a horde of screaming fans. Extra sleep was required.

Anyway...

Over at TPM Cafe Book Club, a discussion has broken out over Juliet Eilperin's book Fight Club Politics. I want to hone in on 2 arguments inspired by this conversation. The first is that her argument for more compact congressional districts would help Republicans.

Eilperin thinks that one of the primary reasons for the fierce partisanship of Congress is the decline in the number of marginal districts due to gerrymandering. In other words, rather than a bunch of swing districts that either party could win, which would produce moderates, now every congressional district is drawn to be either overwhelmingly liberal or conservative - producing extreme politicians. Eilperin thinks that we should create more "rational" rather than bizarrely drawn districts. Stirling Newberry thinks that "solid" districts would be biased towards Republicans, since they tend to live in more spread out rural areas.

I have 2 points. First, Eilperin is wrong in thinking that there are no more marginal seats - while there are far fewer, there are still about 100 of them. Even in theoretically marginal seats, ideological incumbents are re-elected by wide margins. So gerrymandering can't be the only major cause of extreme partisanship.

Second, I think Newberry might be making a mistake in assuming that cleaner district lines would tend Republican. The current district lines advantage Republicans, and they are the ones that look all crazy. They are drawn that way to "pack" minorities into a few districts, thus creating a couple of 90% Democratic districts and a lot of 60% Republicans ones. If these districts were rationalized, minorities would be distributed across more district and a lot more competitive districts would be created.

The other critique of Eilperin's work I want to comment on is by Mark Schmitt. I agree with 99% of what Schmitt writes in his piece, but I want to quibble with his closing remarks. I will quote the key passage in full:

My greatest fear coming out of this singularly partisan era is that the Democrats, especially those who became interested or involved in politics only in the last few galvanizing years, will think this is the way it is, that an era of one-party absolute control will be or should be followed by another. It will not be. Even if by 2009, Democrats win back the House, Senate and presidency, they will not be able to govern as the current Republican majority governs but will need to find ways to work together, especially given the need for unpopular actions such as postponed tax increases and difficult choices as on Iraq and health care. Eilperin’s book shows how much the common practices within Congress that might make these decisions possible have been eroded, and that is indeed a great tragedy.

Since Schmitt's whole point is that it is the ruthless behavior of Republicans that is driving extreme partianship, I find if curious that his concluding argument is to imply that Democrats should avoid being as tough on the Republicans as the Republicans have been on them. He seems to be suggesting that Democrats to try their best to govern in a bipartisan manner. I'm sorry Mark, but I don't see how that's possible, since the Republicans have no interest in bipartisan politics. Their sole consideration will be to recover their political majority. They don't care about policy but about power. Yes it is unfortunate that Democrats are going to have to govern without any bipartisan support, but that situation will exist no matter what the Democrats do. The sooner Democrats realize that Republicans will never do anything to help them constructively govern, the better off they'll be. Otherwise they'll screw us like they did Clinton in 1993 over the budget and health care. Let' s not make the same mistake twice, shall we?