Hi, everyone. We are going to have the most hyped podcast possible on a topic that could easily just make your eyes glaze over as soon as you hear the word gerrymandering. However, the more I have looked into this topic,

the more I realize the drama that exists. And we all know that we talked about

gerrymandering at some point in our education in some high school civics class.

And we know we should know something about it, yet it's not something that we use

all the time. So I found myself really looking into the source of the word gerrymandering,

how it came about, why that history is important, and applying it to the news on gerrymandering

out of Texas that has made national news. But it's still a story that you could see, and again, sort of instantly

glaze over, why does this matter? What's going on? What's the backstory here? And so I wanted to

take a little time to talk about that. Jerrymandering itself, just the origin of the name,

has such an interesting backstory. So first of all, what is gerrymandering?

Gerimandering is when you're redrawing a congressional district to favor one particular political

party or the other. It has been done basically since the founding of America, and it is true

that both parties do it to a certain extent. What we're seeing

in Texas here is an attempt by Texas Republicans to redraw districts. And there's a few things

that are happening that are unusual, which is one of the reasons or one of several reasons

why Democrats are upset about this. The reason why this story matters is there's a bigger question here about not just the state of Texas having the ability to do this sort of midstream. We tend to see gerrymandering happen every decade as we get new census data. I'll explain that as well. And this is sort of midstream.

So there's a question about, wait, can anyone just do this any time? It's not just about the impact

of what Texas is doing in the immediate. It's a question about precedent and what this means for

other states and what it means for our political process. So this is a quick overview. Let's go back to 1812.

What you're seeing on your screen for those of you watching on YouTube or checking out our

social media, it will be there as well, is a cartoon that appeared in a Boston newspaper in 1812.

And what you're looking at is the redrawing of a district, a political district at the time

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