Democrats at the state level have
flirted with making redistricting reform a partisan issue – and thereby
sabotaging any earnest attempt to end gerrymandering – and now Democrats at the
national level are going a step further.
Congressional Democrats, with Nancy
Pelosi in the lead, have decided to make redistricting a key talking point in
the 2016 elections. In fact, The Hill reports that the House Minority Leader latched
on as a co-sponsor of a bill designed to reform the process of drawing district
lines in all 50 states, a rare move by a party leader since they seldom offer a
signed endorsement of an individual bill.
The bill is a fairly good effort, as it would require states
to establish “an independent, multi-party redistricting commission” chosen
randomly from a qualified pool. The group would be charged with drawing
congressional districts that must be “geographically contiguous; have
boundaries that minimize the division of any community of interest,
municipality, county, or neighborhood; and be geographically compact.”
But the reality is that this is
merely an attempt by Pelosi and other key House Democrats to gin up the base and
boost fundraising in an attempt to gain more House seats. The sponsor of the
bill, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), has introduced similar legislation many
times since 2005 and those measures went nowhere.
The House Democrats know the new
bill has even less chance of success, given the solid Republican majority in
the lower chamber. This is merely an attempt to create a wedge issue, and the
only result can be a setback for the true redistricting reform movement across
the county.
independent process of drawing politicians’ district lines are tagged as
Democratic schemes to gain power, the entire nationwide effort to put this
issue on numerous state ballots may get erased.
proposal is a very real possibility, a similar situation is playing out. Former
state Democratic Party chairman Mark Brewer has held numerous town hall meetings
and “workshops” with local Democratic groups, particularly on his home turf of
Macomb County, preaching the need for redistricting reform.
But Brewer, at the state level, and
especially Pelosi– one of the most polarizing figures in American politics —
at the national level, are certainly not helping the cause. They’re only
creating suspicions about motives.
The way to go about convincing
voters that this is a good-government initiative designed to break partisan
gridlock is to draw up a campaign roadmap that detours around both the
Democratic and Republican parties.
Another key player in this mix is Mark Schauer, the former Democratic
congressman who lost badly to Gov. Rick Snyder in the 2014 gubernatorial race.
Schauer
has been traveling the country in his new role as leader of Advantage 2020, a
project of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee that hopes to help
Democrats gain control of more state legislatures by emphasizing the
redistricting issue.
Earlier
this month, Schauer and Brewer held a town hall meeting on redistricting reform
sponsored by the Oakland County Democrats. That gathering belied the messages
being put out earlier this summer that the Democrats were ready to back off so
their efforts wouldn’t taint the anti-gerrymandering campaign.
month, it seemed that Michigan Democrats slowly were conceding that the nonpartisan
League of Women Voters should play the lead role in any type of petition drive.
Jocelyn Benson, the 2010 Democratic candidate for Michigan Secretary of State, now
the dean of the Wayne State University Law School, seemed to recognize the need
for a nonpartisan approach as much as anyone.
But
now, perhaps Benson needs to step up and make it clear that a bid to end cynical
hyper-partisanship cannot be led by a group of partisans on either side of the
aisle.
