In memory of Elbridge Thomas Gerry, fifth Vice President of the United States and a man strangely consistent in his inconsistency. In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander. The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was a portmanteau of the governors last name and the word salamander. The redistricting was a notable success: in the 1812 election, both the Massachusetts House and governorship were won by Federalists by a comfortable margin (costing Gerry his seat), but the senate remained firmly in Democratic-Republican hands. Appearing with the term, and helping to spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head satirizing the map of the odd-shaped district. Consistency. Gerry (who is the Gerry in Gerrymander) had previously played a major role in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, creating the second greatest gerrymander of the Constitution by supporting the idea that the Senate composition should not be determined by population; the view that it should instead be composed of equal numbers of members for each state prevailed in the Connecticut Compromise, due to Gerrys vote deciding the vote of Massachusetts. Yet Gerry was also vocal in opposing the Three-Fifths Gerrymander Compromise, which counted slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportionment in the House of Representatives. He would have preferred not counting them as human beings at all, as he felt counting them would give southern states a decided advantage. ( I would have preferred it if the Constitution had been silent on the subject, tactical decisions of regional advantage be damned. ) Gerry was also unhappy about the lack of expression of any sort of individual liberties in the proposed constitution, and generally opposed proposals that strengthened the central government. (Despite objections to direct elections to Federal office, as he saw they Fed as the creature of the states, and the states as the true vessels of popular sovereignty.) He was one of only three delegates who voted against the proposed constitution in the convention (the others were George Mason and Edmund Randolph), citing a concern about the conventions lack of authority enact such major changes to the nations system of government, and a lack of a Bill of Rights. Elected to the inaugural House of Representatives, in June 1789, Gerry was willing to accept the Constitution IF Congress considered all of the proposed constitutional amendments that various state ratifying conventions had called for. In the debate that followed, he led opposition to some of the proposals, arguing that they did not go FAR ENOUGH in ensuring individual liberties. He successfully lobbied for inclusion of freedom of assembly in the First Amendment, and was a leading architect of the Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure. He also sought unsuccessfully to insert the word expressly into the Tenth Amendment clause powers delegated to the Fed, which might have more significantly limited the federal governments power. He was successful in efforts to severely limit the federal governments ability to control state militias. In tandem, with this protection, he had once argued against the idea of the federal government controlling a large standing army, comparing it--most memorably and mischievously--to a standing penis: An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure. All in all, thankyou for trying, Elbridge Gerry! Here is a pic of our national bird!
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 19:26:39 +0000
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