The Nation
The Redistricting Wars By Sasha
Abramsky December 11, 2003
Traditionally, state legislatures and courts spend the year after
the national Census redrawing Congressional maps to fit the new
demographic realities. The party in control of the most state
legislatures and governorships at that moment in time is able to
muscle through federal Congressional redistricting maps tailored to
benefit itself. And then, having spent a year maneuvering for
advantage, the parties back off the issue and accept that the new
maps will stay in place until the next Census. That, at least, is
how things have worked in the past.
Recently, however, having gained control over more state
legislatures than it's had since 1952 (twenty-one to the Democrats'
sixteen, plus twenty-nine governorships), the GOP has not only
redrawn the state electoral maps after the Census, it has broken
with the decennial tradition and rammed through redistricting plans
in mid-decade, most notably in Texas but also in Colorado, where the
State Supreme Court recently tossed out the Republican legislature's
new plan.
This aggressive Republican drive represents a Congressional power
grab unprecedented in scale and timing. It is being executed with
the encouragement of White House operatives from Karl Rove on down,
with the full-throttle support of GOP House majority leader Tom
DeLay. And its aim is to shore up the party's Congressional
majorities for the next decade.
Amid the brouhaha over redistricting in Texas earlier this year,
Representative Martin Frost's office requested that Library of
Congress researchers investigate when the last mid-decade
redistricting occurred. David Huckabee, specialist in American
national government for the Congressional Research Service, wrote
back that "there are no prohibitions for states to revisit the issue
of redistricting during the decade following the census, but they
appear not to have done so except in response to legal action during
the past 50 years." In other words, actions like those undertaken by
Texas Republicans have never in living memory been launched by
either political party.
"There's been a gentlemen's agreement over time by both parties
that you only do redistricting in a year ending in one," explains
Representative Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat. "If a party gains
ascendancy later in the decade, it's unprecedented to do it at the
next election." Redistricting, says Rob Richie of the Center for
Voting and Democracy, "is a longstanding blood-sport. The Democrats
traditionally had stuck it to Republicans because they ran so many
more states. But they weren't creative enough to realize they could
do it mid-decade."
The Texas redistricting fight, which featured Democrats fleeing
to New Mexico and Oklahoma to prevent the legislature from having a
quorum and federal law enforcement officials sent into action by
Republican politicians to track down the absentee Donkeys, received
by far the most publicity. Wrongly, much of the media portrayed it
as a quirky Texas cowboy story with no wider ramifications. In
reality, however, this was a power grab orchestrated by the national
Republican Party and clearly intended to consolidate power
nationally.
To recap the Texas saga in brief: State Republicans, goaded by
Tom DeLay and supported by DeLay-sponsored political action
committees (Americans for a Republican Majority and Texans for a
Republican Majority), as well as the Republican Congressional
Campaign Committee, successfully broke the Democratic resistance to
mid-decade redistricting. On October 13, they managed to pass a
redistricting plan that all concerned agreed would likely give the
Republicans an additional seven seats in the House of
Representatives.
On many levels, it was a sleazy political power play. Supporters
of redistricting were buoyed by having one of the country's top
redistricting attorneys serving both the State of Texas and
Republican lobbying groups most active in pushing for the state to
implement a new Congressional map. Since May of this year, according
to the Texas Attorney General's office, the State of Texas has paid
three attorneys more than $200,000 to do legal work on the
redistricting issue. One of them, Andy Taylor, is also being paid
for his redistricting expertise by the avowedly partisan Texans for
a Republican Majority. (Taylor, along with DeLay, Rove and a number
of state Republican politicians, did not return my calls requesting
interviews.) TRM, largely bankrolled by a Republican front
organization named the Texas Association of Business, has spent the
past several years working to achieve Republican control of Texas's
political machine, at least in part with the intent of parlaying
this power into a redistricting advantage for federal Congressional
elections.
While the attorneys and the political players argued that the
redistricting was solely concerned with divvying up the Texas
Congressional delegation to more accurately reflect party loyalties
in the Lone Star State, opponents believe that they were attempting
to nullify the impact of a large number of conservative voters who
split their votes between Republicans in presidential and local
elections and Democrats in Congressional races.
Texas was only one part of a national strategy. In Colorado,
after the Republicans won control of the state legislature in 2002,
they promptly redrew a redistricting map imposed by the courts a
little more than a year before. On December 1, Colorado's Supreme
Court stepped into the fray, ruling that the state's Constitution
only permitted redistricting once per decade, and that since the
districts had already been redrawn by the courts in 2001-02, the
Republicans had acted illegally by instituting a fresh round of
redistricting this year. The court's majority held that "the state
constitution limits redistricting to once per census.... Having
failed to redistrict when it should have, the General Assembly has
lost its chance to redistrict until after the 2010 federal census."
This decision has given new hope to the Texas Democratic Party in
its lawsuit seeking to overturn the Republican coup. While the Texas
State Constitution does not, apparently, explicitly forbid multiple
redistrictings within a single decade, opponents of the
redistricting plan have argued that it violates the voting rights of
minorities by reducing the number of seats effectively controlled by
minority voters; they have also argued that politically motivated
redistricting is inherently unlawful. A three-member panel of
federal judges is slated to hear the case starting in mid-December.
Already Tom DeLay and other top Republicans have been subpoenaed in
the case.
Yet even as these lawsuits wend their way through the courts,
there are rumors that Republicans elsewhere are planning similar
power grabs. In Ohio, in particular, there are rumors that
Republicans are planning mid-decade redistricting.
In each state where mid-decade redistricting has become a major
issue, key Republican state representatives told the media that they
had been telephoned about the redistricting issue by Karl Rove. The
Washington Post reported that Rove even phoned one GOP state
senator in Texas who was opposed to redistricting to indicate how
important this issue was to President Bush. "It was the most
unbelievable raw exercise of power," recalls US Representative Diane
DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. "The leadership suspended rules and
just rammed it through. I talked to a number of Republican
legislators and they said, 'I've got to do this. I'm being forced to
do this.'" Other White House confidantes, including ex-Bush
spokeswoman Karen Hughes, are also known to have discussed the issue
with Texas Governor Rick Perry.
While White House officials acknowledge that Rove talked with
some state legislators about redistricting, the White House and the
national Republican Party have repeatedly denied that the
Administration has been orchestrating a redistricting power grab.
They portray the Rove conversations as the innocuous musings of one
lone individual. It's a point of view Democrats aren't buying. "Rove
is the national Republican Party," asserts Representative Frost.
"He's the President's chief political operative. He's not doing this
on his own. It would be inconceivable for him to not be doing it for
the Republican Party."
In addition to the machinations in Texas, Colorado and Ohio, a
particularly robust round of routine post-Census redistricting had
already occurred in 2001-02 in four crucial swing states where the
Republicans had control of the state apparatus. In Michigan, in 2000
the Democrats had a 9-to-7 edge in Congressional representation; in
2002, despite the Democrats' polling 49 percent, as against 48
percent for the GOP, according to the Center for Voting and
Democracy, the Republicans ended up with a 9-to-6 edge in
Congressional seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans created a 12-to-7
divide instead of the 11-to-10 split resulting from the previous
election. In Florida, the Republicans expanded their majority from
15-to-8 to 18-to-7, "entirely due to redistricting," according to
the center's Rob Richie. Similarly, in Ohio, even before the rumors
about additional mid-decade changes, redistricting had already moved
a seat into the GOP column.
The US Supreme Court heard arguments on December 10 in Vieth
v. Jubelirer, a case challenging the constitutionality under the
equal protection clause of Pennsylvania's newly gerrymandered
Congressional boundaries. Several Democratic Congressmen, the ACLU
and the NYU Brennan Center for Justice have all filed
friend-of-the-court briefs in the case. In the meantime, however,
the redistricting maps remain in place.
All told, assuming support for the two major parties remains
roughly constant, and assuming the Supreme Court does not step into
the fray too aggressively, the 2001 redistricting in newly
GOP-controlled Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, coupled
with the ongoing power grab in Texas, Colorado and possibly Ohio,
could give the Republicans up to twenty additional House seats in
the next election. The cumulative impact of this change will make it
far harder for the Democrats to secure a Congressional majority over
the course of the next several election cycles.
Beyond controlling a historically exceptional number of state
polities, the Republicans have also been aided in their plans by the
advent of extraordinarily powerful redistricting software. In the
decade-plus since the last round of redistricting following the 1990
Census, the technology of redistricting software has improved to the
point where any organization can load sophisticated mapping programs
onto their operatives' laptops, plug in demographic variables and
generate devastatingly accurate redistricting maps designed to
concentrate or diffuse party supporters in units tailor-made to
benefit one party over another.
"The fact that the software's really affordable means a lot of
these groups are using it. It's about $5,000 a copy," says Howard
Simkowitz, product manager for Maptitude for Redistricting, a
high-selling software package produced by the Caliper Corporation.
Ten years ago, explains Simkowitz, "it would have been probably ten
times as much. The price is way down. We got into the redistricting
market in a big way this time around. It's become a lot easier to
build districts that are lopsided districts, because people can
understand the data so much better. You're able to really manipulate
the data quickly, to try different scenarios, to move the boundaries
around and see what that means."
Parties can now work out the most effective ways either to
ghettoize their opponents' votes into a small number of extremely
safe seats, or dilute their votes by redrawing Congressional
boundaries so as to break up voting blocs into several different
districts thought to be populated by a majority from the other
party. Indeed, the power of this software is mentioned in the US
Supreme Court briefs as one more bit of evidence indicating that
those who draw the Congressional lines now effectively control the
contours of Congress.
While in theory the redistricting technology that has recently
come online is party-neutral, in practice the maps produced by the
party in control of state legislatures at the time the software
became widely available were implemented wholesale, while the maps
produced by those affiliated with the minority party are essentially
little more than whimsical wish lists. Because of the current state
political landscape, the advent of this technology has further
played to the Republicans' advantage.
In Texas, for example, the Republicans chose to concentrate
Democratic votes into a handful of massively safe Democratic seats,
in the process diluting the Democratic presence in many other seats
that, until this year, were considered competitive for both parties.
While such practices have a long history, the precision of the new
software makes it that much easier to create boundaries that are
virtually invulnerable to electoral surprises. Thus it makes those
in control of the map-making that much more important within the
political process. Many Democrats believe the Republican strategy in
Texas ultimately involves creating a handful of ultrasafe Democratic
seats based on the votes of African-Americans and Latinos, while
ringing these seats with safe Republican districts dominated by
conservative white voters.
Absent an extraordinary collapse in levels of public support for
the GOP, or a comprehensive Supreme Court ruling against the
practice of out-and-out political gerrymandering during
redistricting battles, the result of all this maneuvering is likely
to be a Republican stranglehold on the House of Representatives for
the rest of the decade. And this is despite the fact that the
electorate is split virtually down the middle in its support for the
two main parties. "Not counting 2002," a year in which the
Republicans polled better than in recent elections, helped by the
coattails effect of the wartime popularity of President Bush, "the
last three elections before that had less than 1 percent difference
between Democrats and Republicans," says Steve Hill of the Center
for Voting and Democracy. "That's only happened seven times in the
past century. It's conceivable that [as a result of redistricting]
you could see Democrats winning more of the popular vote nationwide
than Republicans, yet winning less of the seats."
The Republicans are playing a very risky game. As with the 2000
presidential election and the California gubernatorial recall
election, by undermining the traditional time constraints on
redistricting, they have carried out an end run around the accepted
parameters of political partisanship. In so doing, they are greatly
diminishing the ability of the country's political structures to
float above the debates and passions engendered by day-to-day
politicking. By impinging on the structures themselves, the
Republican machine may ultimately render stable governance a halcyon
vision from the past. For what one party does, the other party is
sure to follow up on.
Some strategists believe that the Democrats, when they still
controlled the legislature and governorship in California, should
have broken up the Republican voting bloc in conservative Orange
County by extending the boundaries of overwhelmingly Democratic
districts from Los Angeles southward. "The Democrats had the chance
to do in California what Tom DeLay is doing in Texas," states Steve
Hill. "The Democrats didn't leave themselves enough opportunities to
retake the House. They're going to suffer that problem now
throughout the rest of the decade. This is the winner-take-all
system. That's the game." Now, in the states they still control, the
Democrats will likely face tremendous pressure to try to counteract
the Republican seat grab in Texas and Colorado. With both Democrats
and Republicans scrambling to redraw Congressional lines after each
election, a downward cycle of political one-upmanship has now become
a virtual certainty. |