Austin Bay Blog

An interesting article by Richard Brookhiser (hat tip realclearpolitics).

Brookhiser’s lede is sharp, punchy– and true:

Washington smarties will tell you that only 15 House seats are ever truly in play every two years, thanks to gerrymandering. This is the world, comfortable and eternal, that all politicians want (even politicians in the minority, though they would like to be in the majority, prefer stasis to uncertainty). But an old friend, who is smarter than all the smarties, told me not to believe in the Nirvana of gerrymandering. “When the American people want to move, they will just go,” my old friend said.

Key grafs:

This is the heart of the matter. The worst of Congressional irresponsibility is not that people profit in illegal ways; it is that Congressmen, quite legally, funnel nickels and dimes—millions of them—to their constituents. In the short run, each transaction is rational—for the Congressman and his constituents, obviously, but even for the public as a whole, since benefits are large and concentrated while costs are small and diffused. We notice the damage only when we add up the costs generated by everyone and find that Congress has put us in the position that the Republican Party, 12 years ago, thought was alarming.

Will the Republican Party recover some of that sense of alarm?…

The Republican Party had better move beyond alarm to action — or it will lose at the polls, and deserve to lose.