Justin’s got an update from the courthouse on the government’s cross-examination of David Safavian.

Preview snippet …

“Did you think you were qualified for the job?” [prosecutor] Zeidenberg asked.

“Probably not, actually,” Safavian said.

“Are you intelligent enough to do the job?” Zeidenberg followed up.

Safavian gave an extensive pause. “I suppose so.”

Last night I happened upon this article at the TNR website that advances the unorthodox claim that partisan gerrymandering has nothing to do with the late-20th century decline in the number of contested races in the House of Representatives.

Here’s the article in TNR; and here’s a much lengthier and (to some of us) impossible to understand academic paper that sets forth the results of regression analyses and other fancy math that, we’re told, prove the point.

As you know, though gerrymandering is literally as old as the USA, the conventional argument is that the practice has become increasingly effective in recent decades because computer programs and modeling have allowed the folks who design congressional districts to make a qualitative leap forward in the specificity or perhaps granularity of their knowledge. And that, along with computer programs that can spit out endless permutations of possible district maps, allow the line-drawers to come up with maps perfectly designed to ensure one or the other party’s control of the district. So, same agenda behind the gerrymanders but just a qualitatively leap forward in the technology used to implement it.

But the authors of this piece say this isn’t so.

They don’t say these highly precise districts don’t stack the deck. What they argue is that the legal strictures of the voting rights revolution (‘one man, one vote’, the civil rights act, etc.) have cancelled out the greater precision. In fact, they say it’s slightly more than cancelled it out, making partisan gerrymanders slightly less effective than in the old days.

They suggest that the more likely culprits for decreasing competitiveness are media penetration (probably an overlooked suspect), money in politics and political polarization itself.

(ed.note: Totally obscure reference. I’m curious whether some analogy could be drawn between the effects of media penetration and the role of religious confessionalization on the hardening of confessional lines in the 17th century. Perhaps a strained comparison; but maybe not as strained as we’d like.)

Now, whenever I see a poli-sci study with regression analyses and number-crunching I immediately know the best thing for me to do is not even read it. Because I just don’t have any serious grasp of the methodology that would allow me to independently evaluate the quality of the argument and evidence. Either that or I’m too lazy. But I’d be curious to hear what others make of this. And I have to say that I find myself inclined to believe the dumbed-down overview of the argument presented in the TNR article. The way they interpret the evidence of the last couple decades — particularly, what happened after the 1990 and 2000 census/redistricting — seems questionable to me. But that may simply be a matter of the sample set we’re dealing with being too small.

In any case, I’m curious to hear what others think of this.

Another poli-sci study that says the redistricting theory of declining House race competitiveness (tantamount to gospel truth among politicos) doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

A number of readers have written say, in so many words, ‘Hey, don’t tell me gerrymandering isn’t effective. These guys wouldn’t be spending all that time and money on it if it didn’t work.’

First, I think you’d be surprised how much money people blow on worthless things. But this isn’t what the authors of the study are saying. They are disputing the contention that gerrymadering has become more effective in recent decades. And if that’s true, then gerrymandering isn’t the culprit for the declining competitiveness of House races.

Late Update: Of course, the best real world test of the role of redistricting is the discrepancy between the results of House and Senate races. Senate races, of course, don’t get redistricted. It’s always the same geographical jurisdiction. One might speculate that the effect of population mobility and people choosing where they live by the culture of a given region is nullified at the state level because states usually have several different cultural affinity regions. So New York state has New York City, Long Island, Westchester. And that’s just in the greater New York metropolitan area. Most of the Republicans are upstate.

TPM Reader DB responds on gerrymandering …

Well, I haven’t read the TNR piece and don’t want to, but here are some thoughts on the subject:

The result of Baker v. Carr and its progeny (the “one man, one vote” revolution) was, indeed, a huge step forward for fairness and was bigger than any bad developments later. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been bad developments recently.

I worked in the Texas Legislature in the 1960s and was part of a counsel team that argued White v. Regester II, a Texas voting rights case, to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975.

Pre-Baker v. Carr was way more unfair than anything happening now. It’s hard to imagine, but it was OK to have one House district with a million people and another with 100,000, or any some such. In Texas, that was done–Houston, for instance, just got one House member for its whole county–just arbitrarily. At the time, Texas had about 23 house seats, and Houston had well more than one tenth of the population. Now, when that was legal, you could get away with anything. It was like Nineteenth Century England’s practice of “rotten boroughs” in parliament.

But that’s 40 years ago.

In post Baker v. Carr, the House districts must be very close to equal in population, based on the last census. So, what unfairness can be done under this system?

Well, the trick is–and DeLay did it very effectively in his now contested redrawing of the Texas lines–to draw a bunch of reliable say, 54-46% districts for your party. Absent extraordinary circumstances, your party wins all those. But you’re constrained by the need for the population splits of the districts to be equal and by the fact that the opposing party does, in fact, have a lot of voters in your state. Say, the two parties are even in voters. Well, the other party is going to have to win some districts as a matter of mathematical necessity. So, what you do is you have some districts where the opposing party wins, for instance, 80-20%. Now, every voter who votes for the winner and who was not needed to get a plurality of one vote is a “wasted” vote. In the case of the 80-20 district, your opposing party is wasting 3 of every 8 of its votes. But in the 54-46 district, the winning party is “wasting” less than ten per cent of its votes. So, you can force the other party to waste a lot more of their votes and thereby get a disproportionate amount of representation for your party.

Now, I cannot imagine that accomplishing this has not been aided by computer technology. No poly/sci analysis would convince me otherwise. I know lawyers who were advising the Republican members of the Texas Lege during the latest redistricting, and they certainly thought so.

I cannot imagine that technology has made it easier to force the other party to waste its votes; but I also cannot imagine that it has not made it easier to detect a purposeful and systematic effort to do that, as well.

What needs to be done–first–is outlawing the tinkering with districts for admittedly partisan purposes. (In the DeLay case, they have flat out admitted that their tinkering was for partisan purposes). And that will probably not be going far enough. The courts need to reject obvious attempts to force the other party into systematically wasting its votes. But it is hard to say where to draw the line. I suppose there could be a subjective “reasonable fairness” type standard as a means of throwing out the obviously offending schemes. Courts hate to have to get their fingers dirty about such things. But I think it is inevitable.

But it is true that it is fairer today than it was in, say, 1955. And my response to that is: So?

I don’t think you have to agree with everything Jackson Diehl says in this Post oped about Iran to see the logic of his central observation. That, as I understand it, is that Iran has little real incentive to cooperate with the US or Europe on the nuclear question as long any conversation or diplomatic dialog we have with them is on the basis of their remaining a pariah regime in the eyes of US foreign policy.

That observation doesn’t necessarily point to an obvious policy conclusion. But it may isolate the real stumbling block in the way of any good resolution of the current slow-motion stand-off.

I think what Diehl is saying comes very close to what Michael Levi wrote back in April at TPMCafe, though on the surface they were discussing entirely different aspects of the question.

The Iranians want nukes because nukes are the ultimate in regime security, at least from external military threat. Why after all do countries want nukes? In most cases, I think, because being a nuclear weapons state is something like the equivalent of becoming a made-man in the mafia.

Levi’s point back in April was that there was an essential problem with all the clever plans about how to resolve the Iran-nuclear stand-off. And that was how do you provide the Iranians with what, presumably, they really want: guarantee against attack. (That and recognition as the regional power in the Gulf.) We can speculate that having nuclear weapons is their way of guaranteeing it unilaterally for themselves. As long as they remain on the regime change list, what real basis is their for lasting agreement?

TPM Reader BP on the redistricting article …

I think you only need to read a few pages of the Friedman-Holden study to conclude it’s bogus. The phrase “regression discontinuity approach” translates to a finding that in the first election after redistricting, more incumbents lose, not less. I think anyone who follows politics would respond to that finding with, “Well, DUH!” Incumbents lose more often after redistricting because the redistricting is being done by the opposite political party of some of the incumbents – they are drawn out of their districts, or forced to compete with other incumbents of the same party (see Pennsylvannia, or the second Texas redistricting). The Abromowitz et al. study is better – it looks at the partisan balance of districts before and after redistricting and concludes the redistricting is not what is skewing the partisan balance toward extremes – that has happened mainly in between redistricting years, as red districts get more red and blue ones more blue. (This Austin American-Statesman analysis documents the same trend by county.)

The results of both studies highlight the imprecision of the term “gerrymandering”. Some gerrymandering is to protect incumbents (e.g. California, allegedly). Some is to get rid of incumbents (e.g. Texas, or Connie Morella’s old district in Montomery County Maryland). And some is for general long-term partisan advantage, as described by reader DB * but I’d also note that this goal does not necessarily imply greater reelection rates for incumbents, as it often involves taking reliable voters away from safe incumbents; Delay did this to himself in the Texas redistricting (which combined getting rid of incumbents with striving for long-term partisan advantage). I don’t think there’s any reason to think the balance between those different goals would imply that better technology for gerrymandering would increase incumbent reelection rates, so the outcome of the studies is not surprising.

Justin’s been keeping us posted through the day on David Safavian’s ‘I barely knew what was happening‘ testimony. And a knowledgeable DC-based TPM Reader writes in to share his thoughts on how well it will go over …

The one thing CEOs and political operatives like Safavian have in common is their belief in their inate ability to talk their way out of anything.

They’re both wrong.

Ken Lay convicted himself by taking the stand in his own defense. Now he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.

Safavian has just convicted himself by his inane ” I just fell off the turnip truck” testimony.

Don’t leave the courthouse when the jury goes to deliberate – they won’t be gone long. I bet we get a guilty verdict within a few hours, a day at most.

On the upside: once Safavian is convicted and he and his wife are bankrupted by the legal fees, any other staffer who can’t raise money through a legal defense fund will quickly fold. Yes, I mean you DeLay/Ney staffers.

When did Fred Barnes totally go off the deep end into North Korea style political reportage?

Headline of Fred’s new piece on Jeb Bush: “Jeb Bush’s remarkable eight years of achievement in Florida.”

Front page headline: “The Best Governor in America.”

I wanted to find a few illustrative excerpts. But I couldn’t find where to stop quoting. I’ll settle for the first few sentences …

IF ONLY HIS LAST NAME WERE SMITH. He’d not only attract national attention as the popular and successful governor of a difficult-to-govern state. He’d be viewed sympathetically as a leader who had dealt with family issues–his wife’s aversion to politics, his daughter’s bouts with drug addiction–without losing his grip on the governorship. And he’d be the prohibitive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But his last name is Bush. So Jeb Bush, nearing the end of his eight years as governor of Florida, has to settle for being the best governor in America. Not proclaimed the best governor by the media and the political community. But recognized as the best by a smaller group: governors who served with him and experts and think-tank and conservative policy wonks who regard state government as something other than a machine for taxing and spending.

Why is Jeb Bush the best? It’s very simple. His record is the best. No other governor, Republican or Democrat, comes close.

Why is Jeb the best? Because he is the best! No one rocks as hard as Jeb, bitch!

Some day I think historians may find email scam letters to be fascinating cultural-historical documents. As I was scanning through my email this evening, deleting spam, I came across this …

sir/ma’am

My name is, Major. Jeffrey Burton and i represent a faction of American soldiers,serving in the military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, we came across your e-mail address(s) in the process of research and enquiry into an immense millitary global data base. I believe you are familiar with the war situation in Iraq ? Besides the killings, a lot of activities do occur; antique sales, stocked foreign cash discovered and lots more. We are lucratively involved in these activities. Consequently, we require a worthy,upright and business minded individual for safe keeping outside the Iraqi state. You might have an insight through [link]; and details will be sent upon signal of interest. Our contact email ; johnseco@virgilio.it

thanks for your co-operation
AP110.
signed,
Major. J.burton

Of course, why a US army officer would write in the same stilted English as the other Nigerians and sundry African executors who also want me to handle their money is not entirely clear.