North Carolina Districts 1 and 12 are racially gerrymandered

BY ANNE BLYTHE

ablythe@newsobserver.com  

November 15, 2013  News & Observer.

Note the FOUR different colored districts in Durham County (outlined in the red box). See all the slivers of districts here, there, and yon!

New congressional districts have resulted in six U.S. House members representing the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham & Chapel Hill). Durham County (one of the smallest counties in the state) alone has four representatives.

Three North Carolina voters have mounted new accusations of racial gerrymandering in a federal lawsuit challenging the shapes of Congressional Districts 1 and 12.

Republicans at the helm of both N.C. General Assembly chambers led the redrawing of legislative and congressional districts in 2011. Voter rights organizations challenged the new maps in state court, and a three-judge panel upheld the new boundaries in July, though the case remains on appeal to the N.C. Supreme Court.

In October, David Harris, a registered voter in Durham County, filed a federal lawsuit with Christine Bowser and Samuel Love, both registered voters from Mecklenburg County, seeking an invalidation of the two districts, which are represented by Democrats – G.K. Butterfield in District 1 and Mel Watt in District 12.

Their challenge came after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June opened a new legal front for challenging the maps.

The 1st Congressional District, according to the lawsuit, is “akin to a Rorschach inkblot” that weaves through 24 counties, containing only five whole counties. The district is mostly in the northeastern part of the state and includes Durham, Elizabeth City, Roanoke Rapids, Rocky Mount, Goldsboro and New Bern.

The length of the district’s perimeter, according to the lawsuit, is 1,319 miles – “almost precisely the distance from Chapel Hill to Austin, Texas.”

The architects of the 2011 redistricting, the three voters contend, “ignored the common rural and agricultural interests” of Coastal Plain residents that federal courts have previously recognized. Durham, the newly added urban center, constitutes 25 percent of the district’s population.

The 12th Congressional District is 120 miles long but only 20 miles wide at its widest part. The district includes large portions of Charlotte and Greensboro connected by a thin strip – “averaging only a few miles wide” – that follows Interstate 85.

“A person traveling on Interstate 85 between the two cities would exit the district multiple times, as the district’s boundaries zig and zag to encircle African-American communities,” the federal lawsuit contends.

Comment by blog editor:

I own business property on Broad Street in Durham.  Walk across Broad Street to the houses on the other side, and you will be in a different district!

I live in Wilmington, NC about three miles from downtown, but downtown is in a different district.  In fact, I only have to walk about four blocks from my house to enter that district.

Which Do You Prefer? Affordable Care Act (ACA) OR Obamacare?

Why ALL States Need Obamacare - NOW!

_______________________________

My State Needs Obamacare. Now.

By STEVE BESHEAR (GOVERNOR OF KENTUCKY) – OP-ED – NY TIMES.

Published: September 26, 2013 

FRANKFORT, Ky. — SUNDAY morning news programs identify Kentucky as the red state with two high-profile Republican senators who claim their rhetoric represents an electorate that gave President Obama only about a third of its presidential vote in 2012.

So why then is Kentucky — more quickly than almost any other state — moving to implement the Affordable Care Act?

Because there’s a huge disconnect between the rank partisanship of national politics and the outlook of governors whose job it is to help beleaguered families, strengthen work forces, attract companies and create a balanced budget.

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

That is especially true in Kentucky, a state where residents’ collective health has long been horrendous. The state ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in almost every major health category, including smoking, cancer deaths, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, heart disease and diabetes.

We’re making progress, but incremental improvements are not enough. We need big solutions with the potential for transformational change.

The Affordable Care Act is one of those solutions.

For the first time, we will make affordable health insurance available to every single citizen in the state. Right now, 640,000 people in Kentucky are uninsured. That’s almost one in six Kentuckians.

Lack of health coverage puts their health and financial security at risk.

They roll the dice and pray they don’t get sick. They choose between food and medicine. They ignore checkups that would catch serious conditions early. They put off doctor’s appointments, hoping a condition turns out to be nothing. And they live knowing that bankruptcy is just one bad diagnosis away.

Furthermore, their children go long periods without checkups that focus on immunizations, preventive care and vision and hearing tests. If they have diabetes, asthma or infected gums, their conditions remain untreated and unchecked.

For Kentucky as a whole, the negative impact is similar but larger — jacked-up costs, decreased worker productivity, lower quality of life, depressed school attendance and a poor image.

The Affordable Care Act will address these weaknesses.

Some 308,000 of Kentucky’s uninsured — mostly the working poor — will be covered when we increase Medicaid eligibility guidelines to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville concluded that expanding Medicaid would inject $15.6 billion into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years, create almost 17,000 new jobs, have an $802.4 million positive budget impact (by transferring certain expenditures from the state to the federal government, among other things), protect hospitals from cuts in indigent care funding and shield businesses from up to $48 million in annual penalties.

In short, we couldn’t afford not to do it.

The other 332,000 uninsured Kentuckians will be able to access affordable coverage — most with a discount — through the Health Benefit Exchange, the online insurance marketplace we named Kynect: Kentucky’s Healthcare Connection.

Kentucky is the only Southern state both expanding Medicaid and operating a state-based exchange, and we remain on target to meet the Oct. 1 deadline to open Kynect with the support of a call center that is providing some 100 jobs. Having been the first state-based exchange to complete the readiness review with the United States Department of Health and Human Services, we hope to become the first one to be certified.

Frankly, we can’t implement the Affordable Care Act fast enough.

As for naysayers, I’m offended by their partisan gamesmanship, as they continue to pour time, money and energy into overturning or defunding the Affordable Care Act. It’s shameful that these critics haven’t invested that same level of energy into trying to improve the health of our citizens.

They insist that the Affordable Care Act will never work — when in fact a similar approach put into effect in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor, is working.

So, to those more worried about political power than Kentucky’s families, I say, “Get over it.”

The Affordable Care Act was approved by Congress and sanctioned by the Supreme Court. It is the law of the land.

Get over it ... and get out of the way so I can help my people. Here in Kentucky, we cannot afford to waste another day or another life.

Steve Beshear, a Democrat, is the governor of Kentucky.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 27, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: My State Needs Obamacare. Now..