Ask the average American — even, perhaps, the average politician — if partisan gerrymandering is bad and you’ll likely find a quick and easy consensus: Yes, of course, it’s terrible. Draw legislative district boundaries based on favoritism and not the broad public interest? That’s just wrong. The problem is how to find a solution because it inevitably presents the voter with two choices: Either make sure those who don’t share my political views are constrained from drawing lines to elect their preferred candidates or else draw the lines to elect my preferred candidates to thwart those other people and their dastardly ways.
Small wonder that political gerrymandering is a fact of life in the United States. Republicans gerrymander. Democrats gerrymander. Both sides believe they must or the other side will take advantage. There are some limits, of course. One important one has been the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits drawing districts to thwart a racial group. But many of these limits, including those suggested by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, have faded thanks in no small measure to a series of adverse rulings over the years by the U.S. Supreme Court that make it more difficult to raise legal objections.
But one important barrier has remained in place. In the case of congressional redistricting, states have long tied redrawing district lines to the U.S. Census, which takes place once every decade. It makes perfect sense. This is when state lawmakers are armed with up-to-date statistics on their residents, both their numbers and where exactly they live. The whole point of rewriting boundaries is to get election districts to be of equal size (currently in the neighborhood of 761,169 per U.S. House of Representatives seat). There’s been a recent uproar because, at the behest of President Donald Trump, Texas may soon redistrict and, by doing so, affect the balance of power in the House after next year’s midterms. Other Democrat-controlled states, California most prominently, have vowed to rewrite their own lines to counter.
Remarkably, there is even talk of Maryland joining that crusade. Given the state has only one Republican-held House seat, currently occupied by U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, and his 1st Congressional District is not easily gerrymandered because of its geographic (Chesapeake Bay-bordering) and political circumstances, good luck to Maryland House of Delegates Majority Leader David Moon, a Montgomery County Democrat, who has taken up this out-of-cycle cause for the next session of the Maryland General Assembly.
Alas, little good can come from this. If Texas sheds this important decennial restraint on partisan gerrymandering, we all stand to lose. The Democrats may counter (as they must), but this longstanding limitation will likely be permanently lost, and with the attachment to the census tossed aside, gerrymandering is bound to become more commonplace. And that simply gives politicians more opportunity to cause mischief. Who will stand up and do the right thing in the name of the broader public interest? Oh, please. This country has been looking for that hero since, oh, about the early 19th century, when the term “gerrymander” was first coined.
Peter Jensen is an editorial writer at The Baltimore Sun; he can be reached at pejensen@baltsun.com.