Just to follow up on an item from last week, it appears that I misjudged the Dems’ appetite for a fight. The Supreme Court ruled that states were free to re-draw congressional-district lines whenever state lawmakers chose to do so, validating Tom DeLay’s 2003 Texas scheme, which produced five new GOP House members in 2004 (in a cycle in which the GOP went +4 for the year).
I argued, perhaps naively, that Dems, who didn’t want to engage in underhanded re-redistricting schemes before, will feel little choice but to do so now. After all, the GOP is using this approach to gain seats before anyone even casts a vote — once they control a state’s government, they re-draw boundaries to “fix” the House races in advance. They’ve already played this game in Texas, Georgia, and Colorado. (Colorado’s scheme was rejected in court, but they’re likely to bring it back up again in light of last week’s ruling.)
So, Dems are going to fight fire with fire? Not so much.
The result, redistricting experts say, yields perhaps four states where Democrats conceivably could try a mid-decade gerrymander comparable to that of Texas’s: Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico and Louisiana. In each one, however, such a move seems unlikely because of factors that include racial politics, Democratic cautiousness and even a hurricane’s impact.
In Illinois, as in many other states, the current congressional map is the product of a bipartisan agreement to protect incumbents of both parties, election after election. Democrats, who hold 10 of the state’s 19 House seats, control the legislature and hope to reelect Gov. Rod Blagojevich this fall. They possibly could gain another House seat or two in the 2008 elections by packing Republican voters into overwhelmingly GOP-leaning districts, the tactic that DeLay used against Texas Democrats.
But recent history suggests that they will demur. The current district lines have strong support in both parties, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) got nowhere last year with a bid to redraw them in retaliation for what happened in Texas. “I couldn’t get enough fellow Democrats to see the benefits of that,” said Emanuel, who chairs his party’s campaign to elect more House members.
Last week, Howard Wolfson, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Wall Street Journal that “not doing it would constitute a unilateral surrender.” This week, that sounds like exactly what’s going to happen.
As far as I can tell, there are three choices here.
One, Dems can take the gloves off and do exactly what the Republicans have done. Particularly in states like Illinois and New Mexico, it’d be fairly easy for the party to give the district lines a little touch up and pick up a half-dozen new seats. In a narrowly-divided House of Representatives, that could mean the difference between the majority and the minority.
Two, they could push legislation that would change, and improve, the way the process works. Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) unveiled a bill a year ago that would create national standards for redistricting, including the creation of nonpartisan commissions in each state to redraw district lines just once every 10 years. In the 19th century, we frequently saw partisan mayhem, with parties trying to redraw congressional district lines every time a legislature would change hands. Rather than going down this road again, the way 21st-century Republicans want to, Dems could rally behind “redistricting reform” and try to end this nonsense altogether.
Or three, Dems could do nothing. Republicans in states like Texas, Georgia, and Colorado, taking direction from party leaders in DC, play fast and loose and beat Dem incumbents by “fixing” their districts, and in return, Dems take the high road and avoid the unpleasantness.
My personal preference is the federal-standards approach, but it seems that the party has settled on Door #3. Maybe a couple more “red” states have to pull this stunt before Dems realize “unilateral surrender” is exactly what the GOP is counting on.