So, you would rather have career bureaucrats who don't know the neighborhoods, don't know the communities, and don't have a vested interest in the constituents they serve drawing districts to preserve their own bureaucratic institutions? That makes absolutely no sense.

While there are obviously partisan squabbles (and there is nothing more partisan that redistricting), the elected Legislators know their own districts, their own neighborhoods, and their own constituents much better than any group of appointed bureaucrats.

Stephen Casey
Candidate for HD 52

Reply to Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 01/23/2010 - 8:51am.

You're missing the forest for the trees. Respectfully, you'd rather "hamstring" the voters, not conservatives (remember, we represent everyone, not just conservatives) in a very elitist manner and have a fight every two years instead of a long-term vision.

This is analogous to political junk food. And here's the result to the long-term outcome of your process: people cease to vote in large number. And why should they? What would a child do if every time when he was learning to walk and began to fall you came in beside him and made the "balancing" decisions for him instead of let him exercise the brain he was given? He'd get apathetic and unable to make decisions because of poor feedback.

But that is what you're doing with this process. And to make things worse, you write as if we can escape our selfish nature just b/c of our party affiliation. How utterly arrogant and short-sighted. If we are a people of principle, then ends never justify the means. You're just advocating a dictatorship of "your" party. Tragic...

Again, servant leadership in representing people is not an "us" vs. "them." You're still trapped, as evident from your writing, with a fear that our ideas will not win in the long run. If "wisdom is proved right by its daughters," then we have nothing to fear and only long-term gains to make in the free marketplace of ideas. In reality, you're revealing much more, that you don't believe in the power of Truth--capital "T"--to work better, so you feel you must "cheat" the voice of those (what did you call them?) "ignorant masses" to get ahead politically. That is not conservative, but a white-washed, non-committal, elitist veneer upon a weak foundation. If we believe ideas matter, we must stand on them.

This is why the Contract with American failed, why Gingrich endorsed Scozzafava in NY23rd, and why we will weakly grab every 2 years the "junk food" gains when instead we could have lasting change. You've shown yourself not to be a statesman, but an political opportunist. You've missed the point of freedom but instead substituted a political party for a king, believing that the party affiliation changes your human nature, a nature cemented to your face in those rose-colored glasses you look through at the "R" with on your voter registration card.

Your comment is a revealing and true diagnosis of many "conservatives" who live in fear of "the other side of the aisle" rather than living in strength based upon the power of our ideas. There is no misplaced principle in what I advocate. When you want to say there is nothing fundamentally immoral about using redistricting to hook up our party, you've missed the boat completely.

Redistricting is a response to changes in the overall population. It makes a LEGISLATURE responsive to changes in VOTER POPULATION (caps for emphasis). Thus, it is a means to better serve voters, not eliminate their voice.

So you've shown your hand. You care nothing, "anonymous," about the voters (probably why you didn't give your name). You give lip service to servant leadership, and put your party above the voters. What a pity. That's not service, and sounds more like what people had in the USSR (everyone served the party) instead of what we strive for the U.S. (representatives serve the people).