The high priest of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norm Ornstein, weighs in on the U.S. Supreme Court decision to hear Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, in the National Journal. The Pernicious Effects of Gerrymandering:
Almost invariably, whenever I speak about our polarized politics, the first or second question I get is about redistricting. Most Americans who know that our political system is not working the way it is supposed to don’t know what specifically is wrong. But gerrymandering is something that clearly stands out for many. That is true even for Bill Clinton, who spoke about polarization and dysfunction at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative and singled out gerrymandering as a prime cause.
The reality, as research has shown, is that the problem is more complicated than that. The “big sort,” in journalist Bill Bishop’s term, where Americans increasingly concentrate in areas where they are surrounded by like-minded people, is a major factor in the skewing, and the homogeneity, of districts. Other partisan residential patterns, including the fact that Democrats tend to live in more high-density urban areas, while Republicans tend to cluster in suburban and rural enclaves, matter. And the Senate, which represents states, not districts, is almost as polarized as the House.
Senate primaries, just like House ones, skew heavily toward each party’s base, and senators respond. And the permanent campaign pushes lawmakers to stick with their team, even if some of the team’s votes go against an individual member’s more moderate or bipartisan grain.
But acknowledging all of that is not to say that gerrymandered districts don’t have a significant impact on the sorry state of American politics.
Gerrymandering has leached much of the broader heterogeneity out of congressional districts, contributing to the echo-chamber effect, where members’ ideological predilections are reinforced, and not challenged, back home. A corollary is the racial segregation of districts—the fact that so many Republican districts now have barely more than trace elements of minorities, giving GOP lawmakers little incentive to reach out or be sensitive to issues that resonate with those groups. Partisan gerrymandering skews results away from the broader sentiments of voters in a state, as much research, including a new study by Duke University’s Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn, demonstrates powerfully.
And, of course, gerrymandering has helped create a huge number of districts that are fundamentally safe for one party. This is sometimes done by a dominant party in a state “packing” the other party’s districts to limit its chances in other districts. Other times it is done by an unholy alliance of both parties to keep all incumbents safe. Gerrymandering adds both to the homogeneity of districts and to making low-turnout primaries dominated by ideological activists the only meaningful elections.
More broadly, gerrymandering moves House and state legislative elections away from any meaningful responsiveness to the will of the people. And the pattern of lawmakers choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their lawmakers creates more disaffection and cynicism among the public.
Almost every other democracy of significance avoids such problems by creating nonpartisan bodies to draw district boundaries.
How do we reform the redistricting process in this country? Through independent commissions that can use multiple criteria—not just equal population in districts, but factors such as competitiveness, compactness, and communities of interest—to create districts that more closely reflect broader public views. But creating independent commissions is no easy task; doing so through legislative action requires buy-in from the same lawmakers who draw the district lines—and who have the least incentive to give up their power via reform.
With the exception of Iowa, where the state Legislature turned the drawing of lines over to a nonpartisan agency in 1981 after disputes and deadlocks handed the power to the Iowa Supreme Court, the one outlet for change has been using the initiative process to implement such commissions. That process worked in Arizona in 2000 and in California in 2008, and while the results are no panacea, the reforms have brought more competitiveness and more fairness to the process.
Guess what? The ability of voters to take control of the redistricting process away from partisan legislators and create a nonpartisan and independent process may disappear next year. The Supreme Court has taken up a case, Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, challenging the constitutionality of the commission. If the Court strikes down the Arizona commission, it will also mean the end of the California commission, and of any future efforts to bypass self-interested legislatures to reform the redistricting process.
The main issue here is the meaning of the elections clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” In previous litigation involving Electoral College reform, as legal scholar Rick Hasen has analyzed in an article for the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, courts have defined “legislature” to include lawmaking actions taken by state voters via initiative—in a fashion that Hasen saw as settled law. But it is no longer settled. The fact that the Supreme Court decided to take this case—instead of leaving in place a federal District Court decision that the Arizona state constitution allows voters, by initiative, to exercise legislative powers—opens up the issue again.
* * *
There is a second issue in the lawsuit: whether the Arizona Legislature has standing to bring such a suit. Of course, the case could be rendered moot if the Supreme Court denies standing. But the greater likelihood is that the Court will grant standing and move on to the broader issue.
If the Supreme Court throws out these redistricting commissions, we can kiss good-bye any efforts to effectively change the redistricting process, to reduce the pernicious effects of gerrymandering. It would take away one of the few weapons available to those who want to find ways to create more-representative and less-polarized representation in our democracy, and to reduce the cynicism about a system now tilted against the American electorate, broadly defined. We are struggling to find avenues to ameliorate the worst effects of our tribalized politics. What a shame if the Supreme Court shuts off one of the major avenues.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I found Ornstein’s piece intriguing for someone who writes for the American Enterprise Institute.
You might as well throw out the whole idea of initiatives, and referendum, if the power over all legislation is held only by the legislature and not by the people. The Arizona legislature, in extreme partisan arrogance says they are supreme in lawmaking not the people of the State.
The legislators wanting to reserve redistricting power for themsevles would love to give power to the AIRC and the people were it a Democratic majority in the legislature.
Really? How do you figure that?
This is complete gibberish. The Republican lawmakers who brought this lawsuit — no Democrats are a party to this suit — are seeking to void the citizens initiative creating the AIRC as approved by a majority of the voters of Arizona, to whom legislative powers are reserved as a super-legislature under the Arizona Constitution, Article 4, Part 1, Section 1: The legislative authority of the state shall be vested in the legislature, consisting of a senate and a house of representatives, but the people reserve the power to propose laws and amendments to the constitution and to enact or reject such laws and amendments at the polls, independently of the legislature; and they also reserve, for use at their own option, the power to approve or reject at the polls any act, or item, section, or part of any act, of the legislature. Article 2, Section 2 also declares: All political power is inherent in the people, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights.
Our elected Republican representatives are turning this on its head: they argue our elected representatives are imbued with powers superior to the people and the consent of the governed. This is authoritarianism.
This is the next logical extension of the argument if the Supreme Court voids the citizens initiative crating the AIRC. The bill seeking to sunset citizens initiatives for taxes to support education and health care by submitting them to the voters every six years, giving opponents a second-bite at the apple, is likely to be reintroduced in the legislature in the next session.
To the point Frances raised about the whole idea of initiatives, my blog post http://stevemuratore.blogspot.com/2014/12/redistricting-harris-plaintiffs-and-az.html
shares key insight on the roots of the People’s sovereignty in US history.
What a shame ? That will sure make the republicans behave themselves. In case you forgot republicans behave themselves out of fear not decency because they are not!