Elbridge Gerry and the salamander
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The etymology came up in the middle of a discussion of the 2025 redistricting battles, after Kiriakou's co-host described the famous early American political cartoon of a voting district drawn as a dragon-like monster, and attributed it to Benjamin Franklin's paper. 

The name

Kiriakou supplied the background. The man was Elbridge Gerry, he spells it, "G-E-R-R-Y", and notes that the name was pronounced Gary. Gerry was the fourth vice president of the United States, and before that the governor of Massachusetts; Kiriakou places him as Madison's vice president. 

Gerry was, in his description, "intensely partisan," and in order to get his friends elected to Congress "he just took out a map of Massachusetts and he drew the district boundaries." 

When Benjamin Franklin saw the resulting shapes, Kiriakou says, he remarked that they looked like salamanders and called them "Gerry's salamanders." That became Gerrymander, and over the years gerrymander. 

The cemetery footnote

Kiriakou then adds what he calls "a little bit of trivia from John's someday-to-be-published cemeteries book": Elbridge Gerry is the only vice president of the United States buried inside Washington, DC. 

Asked where, he answers precisely, Congressional Cemetery, up on Capitol Hill.  The aside is one of several references Kiriakou makes to a manuscript on cemeteries that had not, at the time of the broadcast, found its way into print.

The context

The history was offered as perspective on the redistricting fights then under way. Kiriakou had just laid out the sequence, the Texas House preparing to redraw boundaries in a way likely to cost five Democratic seats, California's countermeasure requiring a referendum and a special election, the Republican National Committee committing $15 million in advertising to defeat it, and New York and Illinois considering their own redraws against Missouri and Florida. 

His verdict on the whole episode was that "we have never seen anything like this in the history of the republic", bad form, sour grapes, and "the worst of gerrymandering." He noted the same afternoon's federal ruling that Mississippi's boundaries were illegally gerrymandered and would have to be redrawn to add a majority-Black district.  Neither man claims the cartoon was truly the first of its kind. 

See also

- Home rule in Washington, DC
- The book the publisher sat on
