Call a Truce: Congress Should Rein in Gerrymandering

Date: July 10, 2006

People in California and other states with uncompetitive, gerrymandered election districts will be disappointed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Texas redistricting case.

The court sort of fixed the scheme spawned by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But the justices outlined no firm principles in the case, which leaves it up to Congress to fix things for all the states.

Fortunately, two bills making their way through Congress would do the trick. H.R. 2642 by Reps. John Tanner,D-Tenn., and Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., and H.R. 4094 by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, would ban middecade redistricting unless a court orders a state to redo its redistricting plan. It also would bring minimal national standards to govern how lines are drawn -- such as having states establish independent redistricting commissions to draw redistricting plans.

For those who don't like the kind of self-serving, tit-for-tat partisan maps so often drawn by state legislatures, no matter which party happens to be in power after every census, both of these bills would be a vast improvement.

A system where a commission draws the lines independent of the state legislature would be no guarantee of perfection, but it would tend to produce fairer districts that have fewer legal challenges.

In the Texas case, when Republicans gained control of the governorship and state Legislature in 2002, DeLay hatched a plan for a mid-decade redistricting , the first since the late 1800s, to favor Republicans. With that new map in hand, Republicans picked up six Texas congressional seats in the 2004 election.

That kind of partisan redistricting wasn't new. After the 1990 census, the Democratic majority in the Texas Legislature drew a map to favor Democrats. What was new in the DeLay scheme was redrawing the maps middecade. Normally, congressional boundaries are drawn after each U.S. census to reflect population changes -- in 1990, 2000, 2010 and so on.

In deciding the case challenging the Texas redistricting , the Supreme Court ruled that while the Constitution requires once-a-decade redistricting , it doesn't prohibit middecade redistricting . It would be up to Congress, which has constitutional power over elections, to pass a law doing that.

But a 5-4 majority did have a problem with the Texas Legislature engaging in intentional discrimination. Republicans had redrawn a district by shifting away 100,000 Hispanics and replacing them with Anglo voters more likely to vote Republican. The clear aim was to salvage the seat of a Republican incumbent.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court's 5-4 majority, called this a "troubling blend of politics and race" that diluted the vote of a group that was beginning to achieve the Voting Rights Act goal of "overcoming prior electoral discrimination." Districts in south and west Texas will have to be redrawn to fix that violation.

This ruling makes it clear that the court will overturn egregious racial gerrymandering, but what about blatant partisan gerrymandering or the self-preservation redistricting that has made almost all of California 's 53 congressional districts one-party strongholds? The court didn't say.

Some believe this decision will lead to a new era of partisan revenge, where Democrats in states such as Illinois , New Mexico and North Carolina hold the governorship and control the legislature, will try to do as DeLay did in Texas .

That prospect may appeal to die-hard partisans, but it is hard to see how it would be good for either the public or for the health of democracy.

Congress has the power to prevent endless retaliatory middecade partisan redistricting by setting a uniform national standard. Congress should call a truce on partisan gerrymandering and pass either the Tanner or Lofgren bill.

Caption:
Los Angeles Times Syndicate / William Brown

Section: EDITORIALS

Page: B4