GARRETT COUNTY, in westernmost Maryland, is a scenic, rural, sparsely populated slice of Appalachia — heavily white, overwhelmingly Republican and, for the most part, modestly educated. On its face, it has little in common with Montgomery County, on the front porch of the nation’s capital, one of the richest, best-educated and most diverse suburban localities in America. A democratic stronghold, Montgomery is home to almost a million people, more than half of them college graduates and nearly a third of them foreign-born.
It takes about three hours to drive between Montgomery and Garrett counties, which are 150 miles apart, and it would be a stretch to lump them together in the same “community of interest.” But that’s the stretch Gov. Martin O’Malley’s committee on redistricting has made by torturing the lines on the state’s congressional district map and joining Garrett and one-third of Montgomery’s residents — all in an attempt to add a seventh Democrat to the six who already dominate the state’s eight-member delegation in Congress.
Mr. O’Malley says that he intends to submit his hand-picked panel’s recommended map, more or less intact, to the General Assembly when it meets in Annapolis for a special session Oct. 17. Democratic lawmakers, mindful that Maryland is one of the relatively few states where they, not Republicans, hold the cards, are likely to go along in what amounts to a transparent attempt to stack the electoral deck to their advantage.
The new map explicitly targets Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, a courtly, conservative Republican who has spent 20 years in Congress representing Maryland’s 6th District, which includes Garrett County. By splitting off reliably Republican precincts to the west and extending the district eastward to add 330,000 people in Montgomery, the mapmakers hope to flip the 6th to Democratic control and hasten the 85-year-old Mr. Bartlett’s retirement. In his place, Democrats would install state Sen. Robert J. Garagiola (D-Montgomery), who would have a strong base of support in the redrawn district.
We have plenty of differences with Mr. Bartlett, including his views on guns, abortion, immigration and much else. But getting rid of him by swapping his constituents for more liberal-leaning ones is lousy, cynical politics — even if Republicans elsewhere are doing the same thing.
When political parties pick their voters, they flip the electoral system on its head, producing ideologically tilted districts and non-competitive elections. The result is precisely the sort of polarization that has turned compromise into a dirty word and paralyzed Washington politics.
The reconfiguration of Maryland’s 6th District isn’t the worst example of gerrymandering we’ve seen; in the right year, with the right candidate, it’s conceivable that a moderate Republican might still have a shot. But if the Democratic plan is enacted, it will distort the state’s actual split in voter registration (about 2-to-1 Democratic) and feed widespread cynicism that politics in America is a game played with loaded dice.
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