If Idahoans want to look at an important part of today’s top political headlines and evaluate how their state stacks up on that front, they can justifiably say at least in one area: We’re among the best.
At least have been. Maybe will continue to be.
The subject is redistricting, which used to be a hot topic (among political junkies if not most people) just once for a brief time every ten years, and only then. Now reapportionment has become a never-ending battle that makes our already junky standards for politics even worse.
The drawing of lines between political districts for purposes of electoral advantage is almost as old as voting. The word gerrymander, either as a noun or verb, referring to corrupt mapping of districts for political gain, goes back to this nation’s founding and a genuinely illustrious founder: Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the fifth vice president of the nation. He was also governor of Massachusetts and as such signed a state redistricting law including a legislative district so twisty its critics compared it to a salamander, rather, a gerrymander.
As then in Massachusetts, legislatures over the years have done much of the work of remapping districts, which has to be done to keep up with changes in population. (Point of interest: Look up the state legislative district map for the 1970s and compare it to today, and see the fast-declining number of rural districts compared to urban.)
Legislators, having personal interests in these maps - what politician wouldn’t want to choose his own voters? - have in many places often succumbed to the temptation in redrawing districts to benefit themselves or their parties. Sometimes the maps are so bad they’re thrown out by courts.
After the 1980 census the Idaho legislative redistricting process was unusually bitter, and after the 1982 election the Idaho Supreme Court 86’d it and imposed its own, an odd (some thought bizarre) plan that imposed two layers of legislators, one regional and one more local, increasing the number of legislators overall to 126 compared to the 105 the state otherwise has had since the mid-1960s.
Following that fiasco, support grew for turning redistricting over to an independent, bipartisan commission. In 1994 voters approved that idea in a change to the constitution. While some legislators from time to time have explored the idea of retaking control of the process, the commission seems to have general support. Idaho today is one of the 21 states with some kind of redistricting commission, along with such nearby states as Washington, Montana and California.
The commission system does work well. In Idaho, the maps from these commissions usually generate disagreements from someone, but that’s probably inevitable: The shape of the state and the contours of its population mean that at least a few counter-intuitive districts probably are inevitable. Overall, the maps have been reasonable.
They’ve been fair too on a partisan level: Idaho’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature isn’t that way because of how the districts are drawn, but rather because Idaho just has a lot of Republican-leaning voters. If anything, it would be more possible to draw maps that wipe out most of the few small scraps of territory (Boise and some smaller-population areas) where legislative Democrats do have an advantage. (Idaho’s two congressional districts both already are so Republican there’s almost no way to draw a map to make either of them much less so.)
Therein, in today’s environment, runs the risk: There’s now a growing movement among high partisans (mostly but not exclusively Republican) to wipe out every trace of the opposition, wherever possible. Watch the headlines and you’ll see it in places like South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. In Washington state, where Democrats already hold eight of the 10 congressional seats, there’s some talk about trying to add a ninth, by splitting the super-Democratic Seattle area between a half-dozen or more districts. (No, it’s not likely to actually happen.)
Start down that road and madness ensues, and a whole lot of people who feel unrepresented start to sue, and worse.
Idaho can avoid all that simply by keeping in place the smarter approach it already has.
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