Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Editorial: Take politics out of redistricting
House Republicans should read the writing on the political wall: If they want to retain power, they need to forgo bitter partisanship.
From the RoundTable blog
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One of the known side effects of holding power is clouded vision. Virginia's House Republicans are a good case study for this affliction.
Consider the perfunctory way they shunned the notion that Virginia should adopt a bipartisan method to redistrict legislative and congressional seats following the next census. This short-sightedness could prove their undoing.
Their colleagues in the Senate understand that voters are fickle and can no longer be trusted to return more Republicans than Democrats to Richmond.
The Senate is poised to approve a bill to amend the constitution to provide for a 13-member redistricting commission, with 12 members appointed equally by the two parties and the last agreed upon by the commission or, if they fail, by a court. It isn't perfect, but it is far superior than allowing the job to fall solely into the hands of whichever party holds power after the census is completed.
House Republicans last week were given an opportunity to pass similar bills. They refused because they are still smarting over the way Democrats treated them years ago when they held power.
It's the same excuse House Republicans used last week in continuing to kill bills in subcommittees without accounting for who pulled the trigger or why.
Republicans claim it speeds up the legislative process and is far better than the way Democrats conducted business by dragging out meetings then killing Republican bills the minute a lawmaker left the room.
Democrats were mean to Republicans, but that's no excuse to hide accountability from voters today. Voters don't care about old wounds. All they know is that two wrongs don't make a right, and they are really, really tired of nasty partisan bickering.
Unhappy voters tend to punish the party in power, as was demonstrated in November's national election. They especially have grown weary of politicians who protect themselves at the expense of voters by giving voters few choices. This is the very thing that happens when lawmakers practice political gerrymandering.
House Republicans have a chance to correct their myopia before it renders them blind to the fate of voter retribution. Surely some election -- if not November's, perhaps that two years hence -- will place them in a minority again and at the mercy of Democrats.
Far better to be visionaries now, and prepare for a bipartisan method of defining districts, than to experience the agony of 20-20 hindsight.
