Redistricting Quotes

Redistricting and a broken, polarized Congress have made it tough to be a moderate in Congress.

We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

If you ask the people who are professional political analysts, they would say that the way redistricting has worked, that the Republicans have something of a lock on the House until a redistricting occurs after 2010, particularly as a result of what DeLay did in Texas.

Redistricting is one of the purest actions a legislative body can take.

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.

Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders).