Every state needs a citizen redistricting commission
by David Atkins
Politico has a sobering analysis of the difficulty Democrats will face in retaking the House until 2022. It’s a topic I’ve discussed before, but it bears repeating:
Democrats fell far short of winning the House in 2012, an otherwise banner year for the party, and many are privately glum about taking back the chamber in 2014.
But that grim immediate outlook raises a far more troubling longer-term prospect for Democrats: that the newly drawn congressional lines have tilted the electoral playing field so decisively in the GOP’s favor that the party could control the House through 2020.
That this, in other words, could be the Democrats’ Lost Decade.
Three of the past four elections have produced partisan upheaval, so political forecasting must be approached with caution. Democrats say projecting beyond next year, let alone next month, is a fool’s errand.
But strategists in both parties say they are still reckoning with the long-term implications of Democrats’ disastrous performance in 2010. Not only did they lose the House that year, but setbacks in state capitals meant that Republicans controlled the once-a-decade process of line drawing in 213 districts — nearly five times the number of districts Democrats had oversight over. And Republicans used that power with a vengeance.
The GOP effectiveness in erecting a gerrymandered fortress has created a paradox: Even in a fast-changing electorate, with many demographic trends favoring Democrats, the part of the national government that the Founders imagined would be most responsive to shifts in public opinion and voter behavior may actually be the least responsive.
The possibility of a decade or more of GOP House dominance is something Democrats – and even some Republicans, who still need to hit up donors – are loathe to talk about publicly. But make no mistake: Even as they struggle in presidential and Senate races, Republicans have a structural advantage in the House that could last through the next four elections.
From a long-term perspective, this could end up redounding massively in Democrats’ favor. Republican safety in the House will build overconfidence and extremism, making the party ever more unpalatable to most Americans. By 2020, Democrats should get most of the statehouses back that they lost (outside the South), another round of more favorable redistricting will follow the census, and barring other bumps in the road Democrats should be able to win crushing victories in 2022 that would be extremely difficult to reverse. Hubris should always be avoided in politics, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the 2022 election could destroy the Republican Party as we know it.
Of course, that assumes there aren’t major crises that must be solved before then, climate change among them. However, if that is true the country is in trouble, anyway: the extremist Republican House isn’t about to solve any problems at all, much less urgent and devastating ones their base chooses to ignore.
But there’s a bigger problem in all this highlighted by the Politico article: the House of Representatives is supposed to be the body most responsive to changes in popular will. Gerrymandering makes it the least responsive. One answer to that problem is to do what California did in 2008: create a non-partisan redistricting commission in each state to take the power of drawing lines out of the hands of the state legislature, and place it instead in the hands of non-partisan citizen commissioners.
It sounds like a risky thing, which is why the Democratic Party in California strongly opposed it at the time. I bucked the party line to support it, however–partly on good governance grounds, and partly out of belief that Democrats would actually gain seats by making some incumbent Democrats more vulnerable but still mostly safe, while opening up a swath of previously unassailable Republican territory to real competition. Which is precisely what happened, allowing Democrats to take control of 2/3 of the state legislature while providing most of the gains in the House that Democrats did enjoy in 2012. The fears of opponents that the commission would be stacked by special interests did not materialize. The process was clean and fair.
Taking district drawing out of the hands of legislatures would be a gigantic step in the right direction. It’s a popular idea with both Democrats and Republicans, all of whom distrust politicians generally and despise gerrymandering specifically. Progressives, especially those in states that have a ballot initiative process and that are majority Democratic but controlled by Republican legislature, should push to put on the ballot citizen redistricting modeled exactly on California’s approach.
It would go a long way toward fixing a broken system, making Congress more accountable, and breaking up artificial conservative gridlock at both the state and federal levels.
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