Rep. Elijah Cummings* says that he’s “ready” to face down Rep. Darrell Issa when the latter takes over as House Oversight chair this week. For those who don’t know him, Rep. Cummings is a fundamentally uninteresting Congressman who has been taking full advantage of racial gerrymandering for the last fourteen years to do… nothing at all, really. His most noteworthy accomplishment in that time period, in fact, has been to yell at Mark McGwire over steroid use – which I am sure is all very nice, but it’s not exactly what I’d call consequential.
More importantly – and it’s the major reason for this post in the first place – I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the Democrats that they confidently announced that they were ‘ready’ for the 2010 elections, too. They didn’t do a blessed thing to slow the avalanche down, but by gum they were ‘ready’ for it…
Moe Lane
*Who has the good fortune to be my Congressman, alas.
Took a look: for a racially gerrymandered district in Maryland, it’s…surprisingly coherent. Aren’t there a couple nearby that aren’t even contiguous?
‘Nearby’ non-contiguous districts as in ‘we’re surrounded by them’. 🙂 Cummings has Baltimore (which is majority African-American) to draw from, which means the state didn’t have to contort the map up in knots in order to connect up enough different neighborhoods to make a district. But look at MD-02, MD-03, & MD-04.