Vote NO on Amendment 1
As early voting ramps up around the state, now is probably a good time to remind you to Vote NO on Amendment 1, which supposedly ensures fair redistricting. I’m not convinced.
Let’s start with some reminders about what’s at stake here. (Sorry for the 101 - I am a politics prof, after all.)
Every 10 years, the federal government does a census, in which they count everyone and where they live. We use those numbers to figure out how many people live in each state – and so how many seats they get in the House of Representatives. More importantly, state legislatures are then tasked with drawing the lines for both state legislature districts and federal Congressional districts for the House.
It’s a really big deal.
Smart politicians recognized how important the “redistricting” process is for setting the political course of the following decade. As a result, drawing these lines or “redistricting” typically has been a hyper-partisan affair, with the party in power doing everything they can to benefit their guys. They’ve developed lots of tricks over the years: you can concentrate voters for the other party in just a few districts; you can draw lines so that two incumbents are now in the same district and have to knock one out; and all the other “gerrymandering” schemes you may have heard of.
So here in VA, a coalition led by the admirably-minded non-profit One Virginia 2021 has worked during the last decade to get a fair, non-partisan, independent redistricting process put into the state constitution. Because of how constitutional amendments work in our state, their deadline was early 2019; they needed the General Assembly to pass the amendment resolution during both the 2019 session and 2020 sessions.
It turns out that the GA actually did pass such a resolution – that’s 2020 amendment 1! It sets up a commission that will draw the maps for district lines, and then submit to the GA for an up-or-down vote. If voters approve it in November, it becomes part of the constitution. Yaybo!
So what’s the problem? Well, it turns out the GA couldn’t agree on a non-partisan process. Instead, the coalition agreed to a compromise in order to get something by their 2019 deadline. The resulting proposed amendment, as I see it, has three big problems:
The “independent” commission contains 8 citizens, but also 8 members of the General Assembly (2 Delegates and 2 Senators from each party) chosen by party leaders. Citizen members are chosen from lists produced by the party leaders as well. So the commission will be BI-partisan, but not non-partisan.
If the commission fails to agree on maps, or the GA fails to approve them, the process gets kicked up to the Virginia Supreme Court. The justices might be independent-minded here – but might not. We’ve seen them divide on partisan lines before, and they owe their jobs to the General Assembly who, in another of Virginia’s bad ideas, appoint them. As the 2000 election showed us so plainly, courts certainly can resort to naked partisanship when the stakes are high enough.
But the biggest problem is that commission members essentially have veto power. Any 2 citizen members or any 2 legislative members can refuse to approve the maps; plus a SINGLE Senator or Delegate could kill the maps for their house. This gives bad actors, and the party they represent, significant leverage, and so lots of opportunities for mischief.
Supporters say that the GA will pass some enabling legislation that will solve some of these problems. For example, one proposed bill would demand the Supreme Court appoint two “special masters” to draw district lines. But there’s lots of murky process issues here – who the masters are, how they operate, what kind of oversight the justices have, etc.
Similarly, the amendment pays more attention to the “who” than the “what” – in other words, the rules and guidelines that determine HOW the maps should be drawn. There are some pretty basic non-partisan principles that fair district advocates agree on – compact, contiguous districts that acknowledge existing community lines and don’t favor one party over another. The amendment does mention these, but opponents worry there’s not enough teeth to them; even supporters agree this needs clarifying legislation.
Opponents say: if we’re counting on partisan GA to “fix” the amendment, why not just ask them to pass bills to directly set up an advisory commission and bypass the amendment process? GA Dems actually already passed redistricting rules that would govern 2021 if the amendment does NOT pass, and those rules indicate a willingness to follow the nonpartisan principles. Why enshrine a flawed process in the constitution and hope the GA makes it better, especially if you don’t trust those GA members to do the job in the first place?
The supporters and opponents of this amendment are telling. The Black Legislative Caucus opposes it, in part because the amendment does not have clear guidelines for protecting minority voters. [EDIT: Actually, the VBLC actually took no official position on the amendment; some prominent members like Delegates Price, Bourne and Aird strongly opposed, and I mistakenly understood them as speaking for the group.] The amendment does refer to the Civil Rights Act, but also “judicial decisions interpreting such laws” – like the one declaring much of it unconstitutional? Plus they understandably want to see more clear rules about minority participation in the commission. Maybe y’all haven’t been paying attention recently, but 2020 does not seem like the best year to – once again – ignore Black voices.
Guess who DOES like Amendment 1? Republicans in the General Assembly. They say they want bipartisanship, but that’s what any party out of power says. In fact, one factor in their eventual support in 2019, when they still controlled the GA, was because they saw the Blue Wave coming and wanted to make sure they could still put a thumb on the scale. With demographic trends running against them in an increasingly blue state, the redistricting process is the GOP’s best chance to amplify their influence for the next ten years.
And this is the bottom line: I would love, as supporters argue, a process that “puts people over politicians.” But partisan control is still so strong in this amendment that you are essentially asking everyone to act in good faith. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong about this, but anyone familiar with the Republican Party over the last few decades should find it hard to believe that they will. I don’t necessarily mean this as a criticism. As I repeatedly tell my students, Republicans are better than Democrats at politics, in part because they seem to recognize much more clearly that politics is at its heart about the pursuit of power. But if election districts should reflect the will of the people, Amendment 1 offers a process to subvert it.
Non-partisan redistricting is what we want. Bi-partisan redistricting, on the other hand, is not good when one party is in the minority, but is so much better at the process, and willing to do what it takes to win at all costs. Nonpartisan redistricting is like disarming two sides in a fight. Bipartisan redistricting is like laying out the rules for a “fair fight”- only one side has a stick, and the other has a machine gun. I think this ends badly.
Vote NO on Amendment 1.