Time to amend the US Constitution

The Jack Abrahamoff scandal promises to be the gift that goes on giving for us scandalophiles. The depressing side note is that although quite a few members of Congress may be implicated, the chances of Democrats winning their seats is small because most house seats have now been gerrymandered to be safe for one party or the other.

There's an obvious problem with letting politicians decide the prospects of their losing their own next elections, but it's been perfectly legal at both state and federal levels. Amazingly, when Arnold tried to fix the problem in California, the voters trounced the idea. It fared even worse in Ohio.

In the words of H L Mencken, American politics is dominated by the "boobocracy." Do Americans really want corrupt government by entrenched politicians? Probably not, but most of the time the average voter is too inept to see the connection between "entrenched" and "corrupt." With luck, Abramoff has delivered a teachable moment which can be converted, during the notoriously short attention span of the voting public, into action.

I suggest a constitutional amendment that requires the redrawing of districts for both Congress and state legislatures to be conducted after each decennial census by a panel of retired judges. They should be instructed to consider only the need to create compact districts of nearly equal size, without any consideration to racial, ethnic, economic, or political composition.

This is the political equivalent of the flat tax. The argument for progressive taxation with many exemptions is that the result should be fairer to vulnerable elements of society, but in fact everyone becomes a special interest and the cost may be greater than the benefit.

I'm not a flat tax fan, even though I understand the argument for it. Impartial redistricting, on the other hand, is solid. The preference that politicians feel towards doing the job themselves is obviously self-serving. The idea that minorities are best served by "reserving" some seats in Congress for them by creatively drawing district lines is harder to disprove, except to use Congress as a whole as an example of failure.

If I were a betting man, I'd give 1000:1 against this idea right now. But if we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, and if it entangles enough Democrats to make it bipartisan, maybe there could be a spasm of political morality. Then, who knows?