The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28 that there is nothing in the law to prevent a state legislature from redrawing congressional district boundaries whenever it wants to – several times a decade, if the spirit moves.
The ruling came in the notorious Texas redistricting case, in which Democrats twice fled the state to prevent voting on the new district map, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay eventually was indicted in an alleged money-laundering scheme.
The ruling, split several ways on several points, is a glaring example of how something that is legal may not be morally or ethically defensible.
Colorado has a similar redistricting case. In 2003, Republicans took advantage of their control of the House, Senate and governor’s office to map new boundaries for districts that had been defined by a court, and used in an election, the year before. They surprised everyone, pushing through their plan in the last three days of the session.
It was the worst episode of blatant partisan politics in at least a generation of legislative shenanigans. Republicans were greedy. They already had three safe seats; they wanted two more. Democrats had two, although one of those, the 2nd District, has almost 40 percent independents, according to June registration figures.
Denver’s 1st District is as lopsided with Democrats as the 5th and 6th are with Republicans – right around 2-to-1 in all three.
Next safest is the 4th District, where Republicans have a 15-point advantage over registered Democrats. In the 2nd District, Democrats do very well even though they’re only 5 percentage points ahead of the GOP.
Republicans have a 4-point edge in the 3rd, yet it’s currently represented by a Democrat, John Salazar. The 7th remains the tightest of all districts, but the Democrats now have a 7,000-voter, 2-point advantage over the Republicans. The 3rd and 7th are the districts Colorado Republicans wanted to rearrange in their favor.
This is how redistricting can contribute to divisive partisanship in Congress: If a district’s registration is heavily Democratic or Republican, its representative essentially is free to be as partisan and uncompromising as he or she wishes.
A new book by two longtime observers of Congress – “The Broken Branch” by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein – describes how Congress has turned from deliberative policy-making to “unsettling and destructive” political posturing.
The House, the first branch mentioned in the Constitution, has been vastly diminished, they write, by “the escalation of the permanent campaign, the collapse of the center in Congress, the growing ideological polarization of the parties, the transformation of intense partisanship into virtually partisan politics, and the decline in accountability.”
Intensely partisan redistricting contributes to that decline. It may not be the major cause, Mann and Ornstein write, but it “makes a difficult situation considerably worse.
“Lawmakers have become more insular and more attentive to their ideological bases as their districts have become more partisan and homogeneous. Districts have become more like echo chambers, reinforcing members’ ideological predispositions with fewer dissenting voices back home or fewer disparate groups of constituents to consider in representation. The impact shows in their behavior; and reform of the way in which legislative boundaries are drawn would make a difference.”
They say “the most promising idea” is to transfer redistricting to independent commissions, as has been done for the Colorado legislature.
There’s disagreement as to how, or whether, the Texas decision affects the Colorado case, which is still clinging to life in a federal court. Some Colorado Republicans hope it opens the door for them to map again. But that assumes they’ll keep the governorship and return to control of both houses of the legislature after the 2006 elections.
And what if the Democrats sweep the table? After all they said about the Republicans’ 2003 ambush, they wouldn’t dare look at a map.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
