Another day, another veto from Chris Sununu, who ironically enough is rapidly becoming the most partisan governor in recent memory in New Hampshire. We say ironically because he also habitually denigrates anything he doesn’t agree with as “partisan,” or not in keeping with New Hampshire’s “tradition of bipartisanship.”
This time the target was a bill that would have established an independent commission to redraw the boundaries of the state’s political districts, something that is required every 10 years following the Census to account for shifts in population. The Legislature is charged with this responsibility and would have remained the final arbiter under the bill, voting to approve or reject the commission’s map. But the idea of the commission was to draw boundaries in a nonpartisan fashion that eliminated gerrymandering, in which the majority party draws districts to maximize its electoral chances.
This bill passed the Legislature with bipartisan support, including a unanimous vote in the Senate on a compromise version that Republicans helped to craft.
Our business today, however, is not to argue the merits of this particular piece of legislation but to highlight the comments made on the subject to the Concord Monitor by Paul Mirski, a former Republican state representative from Enfield who chaired the redistricting effort in 2011.
Mirski thinks the commission idea was ill-advised, saying that redistricting is one way that the parties struggle for power, something voters elect them to do. “Politics is war,” Mirski told the Monitor. “People gotta get that through their head.”
We hope instead that people reject the metaphor, which is pernicious. War requires an enemy to be despised. It unleashes a torrent of malignant passions. The point of war is destroying the enemy, with little regard for the collateral damage that occurs.
To the contrary, the point of politics is to avoid the resort to force. It is how society reconciles its differences and furthers its goals of promoting the most safety, happiness, prosperity and freedom possible, for the most people possible.
In fact, politics becomes impossible if it is regarded as warfare. And it is precisely because so many elected representatives in Washington now are ready to go to war about anything and everything that the nation’s politics are close to broken and gridlock prevails even on issues that the great majority of Americans agree on.
President Trump is on record — some would say a broken record — of aiming to make America great again. His supporters may wish to reflect on the fact that during the great time Trump apparently has in mind, roughly the middle part of the last century, political life was quite different than it is currently. Certainly, there were bitter partisan disputes, but at the end of the day, when they felt the necessity of acting, politicians of both parties sat down together and worked out something that they could all live with, even if they didn’t love it. So were advanced — often in halting steps — the nation’s interests. It was not always pretty or inspiring, but important things got done, which certainly cannot be said of today’s take-no-prisoners approach.
In 1787, in the first of the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton framed in this way the choice facing Americans who were considering whether to adopt the Constitution: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” It is still an open question.