Time to give gerrymandering a good funeral

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, June 6, 2017.

Maybe it’s time to stop blaming liberal judges for legislating from the bench. Maybe it’s time for this state’s lawmakers to stop all the blame-gaming and get on with the serious business of insuring that every North Carolinian’s vote carries the same weight.

When lower courts found that the General Assembly’s redistricting efforts amounted to racial gerrymandering, legislative leaders decried the decisions as political nonsense. They appealed to higher courts, and lost at every step. Now, the United States Supreme Court has agreed that 28 of our state legislative districts — including some here in Fayetteville — were illegally drawn and are racially discriminatory.

Instead of acknowledging that the highest court in the land had rejected the districts, several Republican legislative leaders instead praised the court for sending the decision back to a lower court to reconsider its order to redraw the districts and hold a special election for them this year. All the court really did was question whether the mid-term election was an appropriate remedy. The three-judge panel is still free to rule in favor of a special election if it expands on its too-spare reasoning.

Opponents of the special election are likely right at this point: It would be almost impossible to put together all the pieces for a special election this fall. But regardless, there will be an election next year, based on a redrawing of those 28 districts — including House Districts 42 and 43 and Senate District 21 in Fayetteville. Redrawing those districts will affect other districts around them as well. For example, when Sen. Ben Clark’s District 21 is redrawn, it may well put more Democrats in Sen. Wesley Meredith’s District 19, which could give Meredith some electoral headaches.

Of course, it’s possible — and based on past performance, likely — that the architects of the last racial gerrymandering will come back with a new map that’s only slightly distinguishable from the present one. A few clips here, a few pastes there and behold, a new map that’s a lot like the old map. And back to court we go, as new challenges take us up to the eve of the 2020 census, which will usher in yet another round of legislative remapping. It’s a pretty effective strategy for a party that wants to keep an iron grip on power. The Republicans watched, after all, for decades as Democrats got away with their own gerrymandering, with the resultant court battles.

We’ll again remind Senate leader Phil Berger that he was once the architect of legislation to turn redistricting over to a nonpartisan commission. That was, of course, before he became the most powerful politician in Raleigh, a position that he relishes. Still, that independent redistricting office has a lot of support on both sides of the aisle, where many of our state legislators are fed up with the incessant battling over district lines. So are most of the voters they represent.

Gerrymandering does more than help a party hang onto power. It also takes away the power of some people’s votes. In the case of the district maps just rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, it took away the power of minority votes. How else to explain the veto-proof dominance of the Republican Party in the General Assembly in what is essentially a “purple” state where right-leaning and left-leaning voters are pretty evenly divided? In raw voter-registration numbers, Republicans are on the verge of slipping to third place in North Carolina voting groups, well behind Democrats and soon to drop behind unenrolled voters as well.

We need a redistricting method that empowers all of these voter groups. And that’s surely not what we have today.

http://www.fayobserver.com/opinion/20170606/our-view-time-to-give-gerrymandering-good-funeral