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The special session of our legislature has taken care of one vital matter: they have restored the death penalty. In next year's campaigns, they can say that they are fighting crime, even though there is no proof that the death penalty reduces the crime rate, and they can say that they are for economy in government, even though it costs more to execute a felon than to lock him away.
There remain the minor matters of school finance and
congressional redistricting. School finance is simple. When
the school districts approach Denver and ask Where's the
money you promised in 1988?,
the legislature will
respond with Tough. Only a professional educationist
could be stupid enough to trust a promise made by the
Colorado General Assembly.
As for redistricting, they keep coming up with maps, so that each of our six districts is contiguous.
That's the wrong approach. Geographic districts made sense two centuries ago when Congressman Beauregard Cornpone had to travel by horseback; it was reasonable to put the constituents as close together as possible.
Those were also the days of a sturdy Jeffersonian yeomanry. Most people farmed or traded with farmers; the interests of people who lived near each other were pretty much the same. If they lived far apart, their interests had to be different: cotton vs. wheat, canals vs. seaports, owning slaves vs. exploiting immigrants, free silver vs. gold standard, etc.
But things aren't that way now. Congressman G. Reed Rypoph can reach you now via borrowed corporate Learjet, with TV time purchased with contributions from people he has arranged tax breaks for, even with franked mail you pay for. No matter how his district is shaped, he can reach it easily at campaign time, and when else does he need to visit?
Inside his district, there are now no guarantees that neighbors have similar interests. For instance, Boulder has more in common with Aspen, 200 miles away, than it does with Longmont, just 15 miles away. Downtown Denver faces the same problems as downtown Pueblo, not the same problems as suburban Denver. Dove Creek cares about crop prices, and so does distant Sterling, but crop prices mean nothing in Telluride, the seat of the next county.
Instead of drawing lines on the map, the legislature should look at six communities of interest: The Urban District of empty buildings mostly owned by the Resolution Trust Corp.; the White Suburban District of green lawns and freeways; the New-Age Industrial-Recreation District of private jet ports and crystal fondlers; the Parity District of rugged individualists who use subsidized water to grow surplus crops; the Military District of bases vital to the security of the Free World; and the Catchall District for the rest of us, who can't afford our own congressman.
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