Change coming?
For years now, good government groups have been trying to do away with gerrymandering in the commonwealth.
The term gerrymandering goes all the way back to 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry persuaded the state legislature to redraw the lines of congressional districts to benefit his party.
The shape of the district resembled a salamander, prompting a newspaper to call the process “gerrymandering.” The name stuck, but unfortunately so did the practice as state legislators have continued to redraw congressional districts every 10 years, more for the benefit of themselves and their party than for their constituents.
Both parties have been known to practice gerrymandering to some degree, but the Republicans have controlled the Pennsylvania Legislature and thus the redistricting process in recent years and have raised it to a new level.
Consider that after the 2010 round of redistricting, the GOP threw many of the state’s Democrats into five districts while drawing oddly shaped districts to guarantee Republican majorities in the remaining 13 districts. Never mind that Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 800,000 voters statewide.
Local voters have certainly felt the effects of gerrymandering firsthand. For years, all of Fayette, Greene and Washington counties plus parts of the Mon Valley in Westmoreland County were in the same congressional district, creating a contiguous, compact district where many of the residents had similar values.
The district split up in the early 1990s, and things haven’t been the same since. After the congressional maps were redrawn in 2010, all of Fayette County plus portions of Greene County and the Mon Valley were moved to the 9th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Hollidaysburg.
While a majority of area residents are Democrats, they are now part of a district dominated by Republicans, stretching for almost 175 miles from Carmichaels in the west to Chambersburg in the middle of the state. For the first time in the history of Greene County, it was divided into two congressional districts, creating problems of all sorts for local officials.
But change is in the air. The League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court last week, arguing that Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts has disenfranchised Democratic voters. It calls for the current map to be tossed out and replaced with a new one.
“By any measure, Pennsylvania’s congressional map is among the top three starkest partisan gerrymanders in the country,” said Mimi McKenzie, the legal director with the Public Interest Law Center, which is representing the League of Women Voters.
Even more important, the United States Supreme Court declared Monday that it will consider whether gerrymandered election maps favoring one political party over another violate the Constitution.
The justices regularly are called to invalidate state electoral maps that have been illegally drawn to reduce the influence of racial minorities by depressing the impact of their votes, but they’ve never found a plan unconstitutional because of partisan gerrymandering. If it does, it could have a revolutionary impact on the reapportionment that comes after the 2020 election.
It will certainly be interesting to watch both legal cases to see how things turn out. It’s possible that rulings in either case could render the term gerrymandering moot as it well should be. It’s time for such politicking to be rendered obsolete. In the end, voters should pick candidates not the other way around.