To recap the recent sad story …
The 16-member redistricting commission, divided equally between Republican and Democratic lawmakers and other appointees, devolved almost immediately into an exercise in political tribalism. That was exactly the guiding principle most Virginians despised about past decennial redistricting, and hoped to avoid by voting overwhelmingly last year for a constitutional amendment that created the commission.
Paralyzed by partisanship, the commission failed to produce any new voting maps — either for Congress or for either chamber of the state legislature. In accordance with the new rules, the commission was dissolved and the undertaking passed to the court.
There, the justices charged with doing what the commission could not — drawing up voting districts — are to rely for technical and cartographical expertise on a pair of “special masters” chosen from a list of three submitted by each party. The law and the court’s own rules specify that those nominees, charged with hammering out voting maps, “shall have no conflicts of interest.” Yet Republicans have proposed only nominees with blatant conflicts of interest.
Now Virginians know the reason GOP lawmakers unanimously supported the new map-drawing process: because they saw it as an opportunity for blatant political manipulation.
The GOP picks are straight-up partisans. One, Thomas M. Bryan, was paid a $20,000 consulting fee in September by the state Senate’s Republican Caucus. Another, Adam Kincaid, directs the National Republican Redistricting Trust — a partisan GOP group, by its own description — and, before that, held a string of other jobs with the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Governors Association. The third, Adam Foltz, has serviced the party’s redistricting efforts in Wisconsin and, currently, Texas, where he reports to the Republican chairman of the state’s redistricting committee.
It seems unlikely the party could have found more conflicted mapmakers.
By contrast, the Democrats, perhaps naively, avoided overt partisans — in other words, nominees with conflicts of interest — and chose highly credentialed scholars in line with state law and the court’s own rules, which recommend “academic experience in the field.” One, Nathaniel Persily, is a Stanford Law School professor who has been appointed by courts to help with redistricting in various states. Another, Bruce E. Cain, is a political science professor at Stanford University who has also served as a court-appointed redistricting expert, in Arizona. The third, Bernard N. Grofman, is a political science professor at the University of California at Irvine, who has worked on redistricting for Virginia courts in the past.
Astonishingly, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans, openly contemptuous of the redistricting project enacted mainly with Republican votes, suggested that scholars are by definition partisan hacks. “They’re all college professors,” Jeff Ryer told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Can you name another profession in this country that has a higher level of support for the Democratic Party?”
And who cares what the law and the court’s rules say? The GOP has given notice that it intends to game the system. State Senate Democrats, with cause, have asked the court to disqualify the GOP picks. Justices, take heed.