NPR beats up Jordan on gerrymandering, when the US invented it!

Robert Siegel is normally better than how he was earlier this evening when he interviewed Jordan's foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, about the elections there.  But, today, he was awful. Siegel seemed to think that he had figured out the hole in the Jordanian "elections" and asked the minister about complaints that districts have been drawn that work against the voters of Palestinian origins.

I loved it when the minister replied using the word gerrymandering--he denied that they practiced gerrymandering.  Without explicitly doing so, he seemed to remind Siegel and the audience that it is a process invented by us Americans!

Despite that response, Siegel rephrased his question all over again.  I hoped that the Jordanian minister would bluntly remind Siegel about our practices.  But, he is their chief diplomat, after all, and he chose a tactful route.

If there is one thing about US politics that worries me, it is this atrocious practice of redistricting, which works out to be anti-democratic.  The polarization doesn't worry me, though I think the illogical statements and claims by politicians reflect their incompetence and, thereby, our own incompetence in electing such lunatics to offices.  But, redistricting is a completely different story--it means that once the lunatics take over, well, we sane ones are in trouble.

Tom DeLay went about systematically redistricting Texas, to make sure that it would be completely red within a couple of elections.  His success later was also the cause of his downfall, yes.  But, he showed how to rig the process and rig it well.  Pretty soon, many other states followed suit.  The net result?

[How] did Republicans keep their House majority despite more Americans voting for the other party—something that has only happened three times in the last hundred years, according to political analyst Richard Winger? Because they drew the lines.
After Republicans swept into power in state legislatures in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered key states, redrawing House district boundaries to favor Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates received half of the votes in House contests, but Republicans will claim about three-quarters of the congressional seats. The same is true in North Carolina. More than half the voters in that state voted for Democratic representation, yet Republicans will fill about 70 percent of the seats. Democrats drew more votes in Michigan than Republicans, but they'll take only 5 out of the state's 14 congressional seats.

Haha, the joke is on us!  The next census isn't until 2020, only after which will the lines be redrawn again.  That means we are kind of locked into the split for a while:

If there is any testament to the amount of progress Republicans made in redistricting, it is this. GOP-controlled states drew about four times as many districts as Democrats did, and Republicans reaped significant benefits from that on Election Day. ...
And going forward, it suggests Democrats will need to have a strong wind at their backs (bigger than Tuesday’s) to take back the chamber.

If this is the story in a country that has been democratic for more than two hundred years, what was Siegel trying to prove with his question on redistricting in Jordan?  Other than to show that we don't practice what we preach?

By the way, it doesn't mean that the GOP is the only sinner; the Democrats too will do that if they had the chance--but, I doubt if they will be ever as brazen as the likes of DeLay.