Gerrymandering Is Undemocratic Until It’s Not

The editors of the Wall Street Journal chortle over Illinois and New York Democrats scrambling to retract their earlier pledges about gerrymandering:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker campaigned in 2018 against partisan gerrymandering, saying he would “pledge to veto” any 2022 map drawn by the state Legislature. He insisted on “an independent commission to handle creating a new legislative map.” Last month Republicans in the Legislature proposed to create a redistricting commission appointed by the state’s Supreme Court.

But as the partisan pens meet paper, Gov. Pritzker now says he’ll be satisfied with a map drawn by his legislative allies. In a recent press conference he walked back his veto pledge and scored Republicans for objecting to Democratic-controlled redistricting. “I hope the Republicans will choose to work with Democrats on the map. Right now it looks like they’re just saying no,” he said.

Democrats control more than 60% of seats in one Illinois legislative chamber and nearly 70% in the other. They occupy 13 of 18 seats in its federal House delegation. The Democratic-controlled redistricting will naturally seek to preserve those state-level majorities and ensure that the House district lost to the new Census apportionment is majority-GOP.

Campaign promises against gerrymandering don’t mean much when a state government is under one-party control. In New York, Democrats are hard at work neutering the bipartisan commission set up in 2014 to limit partisan manipulations of the electoral map.

Democrats in Albany first tried to withhold funding from the commission, which is composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and two independents. Now it’s placed an opaque constitutional amendment on the ballot this November designed to tilt the balance of power on the commission ahead of its deadline to submit a map in January.

The amendment would eliminate the requirement that the commission’s co-directors have support from commissioners appointed by the minority party, and weaken bipartisan vote requirements for the commission to send a map to the Legislature. It would also eliminate the supermajority requirement for the Democratic-controlled Legislature to approve any map, further boxing out the GOP.

These changes to the delicate compromise that made the “independent” commission politically palatable increase the chance that it will fail to vote on a map at all. If that happens, Albany Democrats would have free rein to carve up districts as they please. Democrats are looking to expand their 19 to 8 majority in the Empire State House delegation.

None of this should be surprising to observers of the gerrymandering debate. Both parties try to exploit their dominance in states to give their candidates an edge. The special cynicism comes from those who claim to be high-minded in supporting an “independent” commission that delivers similar partisan results. Ditto for the media who wink at such shenanigans.

The reality is that whichever party controls the state legislature will redraw its districts following reapportionment to give advantages to their incumbents and impose disadvantages on the opposition party and upstarts.

No reference to gerrymandering in Illinois can really be complete without a tip of the hat to the Illinois Fourth Congressional District:

As you can see in some places it’s just a few feet wide. It was drawn that way to ensure that Chicago would elect at least one Hispanic representative and that was the only way the map could be drawn to unite enough Hispanic voters in, obviously, two different neighborhoods to ensure that outcome. But that was a long time ago and it’s obsolete. It needs to go.

My own home district, the Illinois Fifth, is gerrymandered, too, mostly to ensure that the seat remains safely in regular Democratic hands. Without such gyrations it might be a swing district in one form or another.