Even a cursory glimpse will reveal that the Seventh is no vertebrate. If I had to compare it to a class of carbon-based life-forms, I'd probably go with the slime molds.
Slime molds, as it happens, were once classified with the fungi - an uncanny coincidence, since the Seventh, once a suburban Philadelphia district, now manages to extend into a prime mushroom-growing region on the Maryland border. Maryland, by the way, is one of three states the new district borders. It also spans five Pennsylvania counties and nearly 100 municipalities. And it divides more than a quarter of those generally small cities, townships, and boroughs among more than one congressional district - a practice that likely persuaded the commonwealth's highest court to throw out similarly contorted new state legislative districts last week.
Also coincidentally, slime molds have been posited as the biological basis for the organism that devours Downingtown in the 1958 horror movie The Blob. As for the Seventh District, it narrowly misses that Chester County borough in its oleaginous creep across the region.
From the urban outskirts of Philadelphia, the Seventh's metastatic dimensions - heedless of geography and conventional understandings of democracy - stretch in almost every direction. The district's northern reaches go clear to the Berks County community of Woodchoppertown, whose forefathers appear to have chosen its name to ensure that no one would ever be cynical enough to assign their representation to a Philadelphia pol. As The Inquirer reported, many of the people who live there are, like most Americans, not even sure what a "hoagie" is.
