We’re at the height of the decennial redistricting season, which occasioned this thought:
When you defend drawing a partisan gerrymander in your state, you’re not just sticking it to the opposing national party. You’re rationalizing unfairness toward voters in your state who’ve done nothing to deserve that.
This is why the “we won’t stop gerrymandering until the other side behaves” excuse falls so flat. Your obligation to stop arises not from some duty you owe the opposing party, but (if you are a legislator) from a duty you owe citizens of your own state.
As longtime readers know, my interest in this topic goes beyond my various writings and the talks I’ve given around the country in states like North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Separately from my work at Cato, I’ve also taken an active part in efforts to remedy the practice in my home state of Maryland.
This year I was honored when Gov. Larry Hogan appointed me as a private citizen to serve as one of the three co-chairs of the newly formed Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission, a non-partisan panel charged with developing Congressional and legislative maps based on the 2020 Census that would be free from favor toward any party or candidate. Not all nonpartisan commissions on this subject have functioned well: Virginia’s fledgling commission, dominated by incumbent lawmakers, proved a fiasco, even as its counterparts in Colorado and Michigan enjoyed a fair measure of success. I believe ours was a model for how such a panel can work, representing a wide variety of Marylanders and working in collegial, fair-minded style to bridge the inevitable disagreements.
I wrote briefly about the process in an opinion piece for the Frederick News-Post. For more, check out coverage from the Maryland Association of Counties, from Matthew Liptak at Inside Sources/Arundel Journal, and from Bethesda Magazine in separate coverage by Steve Bohnel and Ana Radelat. Earlier in the year, I discussed the challenges with Dan Sally at his You Don’t Have To Yell podcast.
At the same time, the leadership of the Maryland legislature appointed its own commission which recently proposed its own Congressional map, covered by William J. Ford at the Washington Informer. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which uses standardized metrics to rate proposed maps, awarded the MCRC map an “A” for partisan fairness, while giving the legislature’s proposal an “F.” We’ll know more next week when the legislature meets in special session to consider both maps.
