Both Democrats and Republicans are very much aware of the significance of next month's General Election in Tennessee. Partisan control of the General Assembly isn't the only thing that the leadership of both parties are concerned about, but the reality that with that control will come the ability to redraw our State's legislative districts in accordance with the pending results of this year's federal census. Democrats in Nashville know that unless there is a last-minute turnaround, the results that we will all know in less than a month could mean that Republicans will not only control both Houses of the Tennessee Legislature but will wield the redistricting pen.

Republicans are eager to expand their numbers in the Tennessee House in no small part because they see a larger majority as an opportunity not only to redraw constituencies, but to skew them in outlandish ways to insure that Democrats won't just be beaten in Tennessee elections in the next decade, but they could be beaten to a political pulp. Democrats, after all, have done the same thing to Republicans in this State for many decades, using their ability to draw districts to insure (they believed) their majority in perpetuity. Since the GOP may very well control the Legislature after this General Election with numbers similar to the Democrats in the days of yore, the talk is nearly universal-and has even surfaced by us in this space-that Republicans could skew our legislative constituencies in the same bizaare way that the Democrats did for so long to give the party opposite a bitter taste of their own dirty medicine.

As tempting as it may be to use the redistricting process to insure the destruction of the opposing political formation, let us propose the radical idea that House and Senate Republicans in Nashville should not have vengeance in mind when drawing the new electoral boundaries mandated by the census. If Republicans are indeed victorious at the State level on November 2nd, let them do the one thing the Democrats never would do when they were in control-draw the legislative boundaries in a fair and equitable way, avoiding gerrymandering as much as is possible. Most computer models show that equitable districts would still give the Republicans a majority in Tennessee, and likely a substantial one. Republicans have an opportunity to show the electorate that they will not do as the other party had done, and that they believe that voters should have a greater impact on political outcomes than legislators, bureaucrats, or mapmakers.

Republicans have the opportunity to show that they are the party of electoral fairness in Tennessee.