Partisan Redistricting Quotes

Political gerrymanders existed in colonial times and continued through the framing. The Framers provided a remedy for the problem: the Constitution gives state legislatures the initial power to draw federal election districts, but authorizes Congress to “make or alter” those districts

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

So [Republicans] packed all the Democrats into districts, very Democratic districts. What that's done is made our party urban, more liberal, and so those people are doing what their constituents want. But that's not what my constituents want.

We have to end political gerrymandering in this country. We have to end it.

California is among several states that already have fought their way out from under partisan gerrymandering by taking line-drawing authority away from the Legislature.

Republicans have spent a lot of money redistricting and everything, getting control of these governorships and statehouses.

To gerrymander is to distort, to corrupt, to turn the institutions that should be working on behalf of the people’s interests into perversions that serve only the powerful, the moneyed, or the politically connected. Whenever political machinations over gerrymandering are afoot, no matter who wins, it’s always the voter who loses.

Even in Madison’s day, the practice of gerrymandering for partisan advantage was familiar. In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison’s Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.