‘Democrat’ Districts PA

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: There they go again.

In the years leading up to the redrawing of congressional and state legislative maps following the 2020 census, the deceptively named activist group Fair Districts PA railed against the drawing of district lines to favor one political party over the other and served up a host of hair-brained “solutions” to the perceived problem.

To be clear the goal of Fair Districts PA has never been, nor is it now, about creating fair districts. It is all about changing the rules and tilting the playing field to give Democrats an electoral advantage. They were spectacularly successful gerrymandering both the congressional district map and the legislative district maps after the 2020 census.

Pennsylvania’s activist state Supreme Court trampled the state constitution seizing control of the congressional district map drawing process from the legislature and placing it in the hands of a Left-wing college professor from California. The ploy succeeded giving Democrats more seats in Penn’s Woods than merited – until last November’s Donald Trump-generated red wave resulted in Republicans flipping two Democrat seats and restoring representative balance.

While the state Supreme Court was doing its part to ensure the success of the gerrymander conspiracy legislative redistricting was being done by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission. Article 2, Section 17 of the Pennsylvania Constitution empowers the commission, which is always composed of one Republican and one Democrat member from the state House and the State Senate. When the four cannot agree on the fifth member, who serves as Chairman, that person is selected by the state Supreme Court.

The aforesaid mentioned activist state Supreme Court appointed Mark A. Nordenberg, Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh as chairman of the commission. Nordenberg then proceeded to deliver a set of legislative maps that would have made Elbridge Gerry proud. (A Colonial-era Governor of Massachusetts Gerry was made famous for designing a congressional district resembling a salamander, hence the term Gerrymander.)

In the process of drawing the new maps Nordenberg violated every rule of district drawing. He sliced and diced municipalities, crossed geographic boundaries such as rivers and mountains, and disregarded socio-economic regions. As a result, in 2022 when elections were first held using the new district lines Democrats ousted Republicans from control of the state House – but by only one seat.

Leading up to the 2020 redistricting process Fair Districts PA piously argued that each party’s representation in the legislature should reflect the statewide vote for seats in that body. Results of the 2024 state House elections show that by that metric the GOP should be in a five seat majority, instead Democrats continue to cling to a one-seat majority.

The next round of redistricting is several years away – it will occur after the 2030 federal census. But Fair Districts-PA is already at work trying to subvert the system and once again hijack the process. They continue to employ the Left-wing tactic of claiming to be against exactly what it is they want to accomplish.

Having been founded by a coalition of organizations that occupy the far Left of the state’s political spectrum – including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Committee of Seventy – their true motives are not hard to discern.

They are pushing for what they term an Independent Redistricting Commission. Again this follows the Left-wing playbook of giving legislation a nice sounding name that is the opposite of what it seeks to achieve. Such as was done with the Affordable Care Act and Inflation Reduction Act.

The theory is to empanel a commission of ordinary citizens who will create maps without regard to political considerations. They are more likely to find a field of purple squirrels cavorting with star spangled unicorns than come up with any such group. But that is not the goal: the goal is to empanel a commission more easily controlled by the Left so they can cement in place the gains made under the current gerrymander.

With the new session of the General Assembly now underway legislation to change the process is being re-introduced. Fortunately, such a change would require an amendment to the state constitution. That is a long and difficult process which, given the current political divisions in the state legislature is unlikely to succeed.

There is no perfect process, but the current process has withstood the test of time. That being said, lawmakers and voters need to remain vigilant because there is always a Trojan Horse like Fair Districts PA at the gates.

(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal and American Radio Journal. His e-mail address is [email protected].)

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