Opinion | A World Without Partisan Gerrymanders? Virginia Democrats Show the Way - The ... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...rginia-gerrymandering-law.html
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Politicians rarely give up power voluntarily. They never give it up when they have free rein to lock it in for at least a decade, and exact long-overdue revenge against their political opponents.
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But a group of Virginia Democrats did just that earlier this month, when they voted in favor of an amendment to the State Constitution stripping themselves of the power to redraw legislative district maps in 2021, after the decennial census.
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Last fall, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Virginia Legislature; with a Democratic governor already in office, they took full control of the state government for the first time in a generation. They had unlimited power to fashion the new maps in their favor, cementing their own grip on power just as Republicans around the country have done since the last redistricting cycle in 2011
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Some Republican maps are so biased that they have given the G.O.P. legislative supermajorities even when the party loses the statewide popular vote, which happened in Wisconsin in 2018. So it’s entirely understandable for Democrats who regain power to want payback — now.
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And yet nine Virginia Democrats agreed to put down their partisan swords and join Republicans to support the new amendment, which would require that the state’s district maps be drawn by a bipartisan commission made up of lawmakers and regular citizens.
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Republicans continue to find countless ways to block efforts to make voting fairer and more democratic. In Missouri, Utah and Michigan, Republican lawmakers are working to undo citizen-led ballot initiatives that were passed, in some cases overwhelmingly, by voters tired of being chosen by their politicians.
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The Virginia amendment’s passage is all the more important in the present moment, when voters everywhere have been left at the mercy of self-serving state lawmakers, thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene to stop even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders
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The ruling last June, by a 5-to-4 vote, asserted that redistricting was a political matter to be resolved by the states, not the federal courts. The justices thus enshrined one of the most corrosive and anti-democratic practices in American politics.
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what of those Republicans? Aren’t they to be commended for voting in favor of fairer maps? Sure, but it was an easy call once they were out of power, or knew they were about to be. The better question is, Where was their public spirit when they held an unthreatened majority
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The Democrats’ vote was a display of integrity and selflessness by members of a party with unified control of government.
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And when Republicans do lose at the ballot box, they respond not by trying to appeal to more voters, but by stripping power from duly-elected Democrats — essentially looting the shelves on their way out the door
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This is the behavior of a party that neither trusts its own popularity nor accepts its opponents’ legitimacy, a fatal combination for a constitutional republic.
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why play fair when the other side doesn’t? The answer is that the alternative is a race to the bottom, where voters of both parties give up because they know whatever box they check at the polls, the politicians have already made their choices for them.
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In far too many parts of the country, that’s the reality today. Partisan gerrymandering is a key reason millions of Americans feel the government is rigged against them.
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The more the public learns about it, the more they oppose it. Virginia voters support the new redistricting amendment, 70 percent to 15 percent; according to a January 2019 poll commissioned by Campaign Legal Center, which pushes for electoral reform, 65 percent said they favored districts with no partisan bias, even if it meant their own party would win fewer seats.