http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110004463


JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL


Safe House, Unsafe Principles
Will conservatives benefit from safe Republican
control?

Monday, December 22, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

DALLAS--Gerrymandering is one of the most important
factors influencing elections today. And now it
appears that the practice of drawing the often
bizarrely shaped districts is about to cement
Republican control of the House for at least the
rest
of this decade.

But amazingly this is drawing little public
attention.
Even NBC's Tim Russert, the ultimate political
junkie,
spent 30 minutes interviewing House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay of Texas on Sunday's "Meet the Press"
without asking about Texas's new and controversial
redistricting plan. Last Friday, the Justice
Department certified that the plan was in compliance
with the Voting Rights Act, which ensures new
district
lines don't disadvantage minority voters, and a
federal court rejected a Democratic challenge to its
constitutionality. If the plan overcomes a couple of
final legal hurdles, Republicans will likely have
little worry of losing the House and Mr. DeLay may
well have the support he needs to become speaker one
day.

For those who voted for the Contract With America to
hand control of Congress to Republicans, the more
important question is simply, will the GOP
leadership
remember it's limited government principles if it
doesn't have to worry about losing control of the
House? Unfortunately, the answer may already be in.
This year Republicans in Congress have passed the
largest expansion in federal entitlements in four
decades and have presided over record increases in
domestic spending. But for Rep. Mike Pence of
Indiana,
"It's up in the air." Mr. Pence led the revolt among
conservative House Republicans against the
prescription drug bill this month and says now:
"Sometimes I think my colleagues want to stand up
for
what's right, and sometimes I think the pressures
for
higher spending are too great."

The pressures for political advantage certainly led
to
a battle royale in Texas over redistricting earlier
this year. Over 50 rebel Democrats in the state
House,
egged on by Democratic National Committee Chairman
Terry McAuliffe, secretly left the state for
Oklahoma
to deprive the legislature of the quorum necessary
to
debate the redistricting bill. The Republican House
leadership threatened to have them arrested and
compelled to attend the legislative session. Later,
Democrats in the state senate pulled the same stunt
except that they hightailed it to New Mexico.
Eventually they gave up, came home and the new lines
passed and were signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry,
a
Republican.

The new Texas lines, if they survive final efforts
in
federal court to overturn them, will mean
significant
gains for Republicans. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
predicts that the state's congressional delegation
will switch from 15 Republicans and l7 Democrats to
22
Republicans and 10 Democrats, a net gain of seven
seats for the GOP. In the current House that would
increase the GOP's margin to 236 to 199. With so few
competitive districts nationwide, the new Texas
lines
may well entrench the GOP as the House majority for
the rest of this decade.

The new Texas plan was largely the work of Mr.
DeLay,
whose aides say it is retaliation for a 1991
Democratic gerrymander of Texas that they believe
forestalled GOP gains in George W. Bush's
increasingly
conservative home state. When the next redistricting
rolled around a decade later in 2001, Republicans
and
Democrats each controlled a house of the Texas
legislature, and the whole process wound up in
court.
There a state judge issued a competitive plan that
discomfited incumbents and elicited howls of outrage
from Rep. Martin Frost, former head of the
Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee. After a week's
worth
of consultations with leading politicians, the
judge--a Democrat--suddenly changed his mind and
released an incumbent-protection plan that left the
state without a single competitive House race in
last
year's election. Indeed, six of the 28 incumbents
seeking re-election last year in Texas had no
major-party competition at all.

The result in 2002 was that Republicans in Texas won
57% of the vote for the House, but wound up with
less
than half the seats. Majority Leader DeLay, still
smarting from what he considered an outrageous
flip-flop by the Democratic judge, plotted to have
the
new legislature--Republicans now control both
houses--come back this year with a gerrymander
largely
designed by him.

This tit-for-tat walling off of incumbents from
competition became a true bipartisan exercise after
the 2000 census, which mandated a new round of
redistricting. If Democrats moan that they have
little
chance of taking back the House, they can in large
part blame themselves for allowing their incumbents
to
greedily build political castles at the expense of
more competitive districts that would have left
control of the overall House more in doubt. The
nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report says only 38
of the 435 House seats are even remotely up for
grabs
by either party in 2004. In last year's elections,
more incumbents lost in the House than in the
Senate,
but only because five districts featured incumbent
vs.
incumbent match-ups mandated by shifting
populations.
Outside those incumbent vs. incumbent races, the
re-election rate for members of the House was 98%.

Gerrymandering has now attracted the attention of
the
Supreme Court, which this month heard arguments in a
case challenging a Republican gerrymander in
Pennsylvania. Democratic election lawyer Ron Klain
says the case is about the "control of
Congress--nothing more, nothing less." It is
precisely
because of those high stakes that court watchers
predict the court will shy away, as it has in the
past, from drawing limits around the inherently
political job of drawing congressional boundaries.

But that doesn't mean reform isn't possible. Some
eight states use somewhat more objective means for
setting the lines that determine which voters belong
in which district. Iowa and Arizona had some of the
most competitive House races in the last election,
in
large part because they have turned over
redistricting
to nonpartisan commissions. Those bodies can have
their own biases, but at least they can be forced to
address considerations such as compactness and the
need to keep communities together, which
self-promoting legislatures routinely ignore.
Perhaps
more of the 24 states with the initiative process
will
consider similar reforms.

Of course, you can bet such reforms won't be pushed
by
state legislators in the other 26 states without
popular pressure. State lawmakers are happy with
their
own incumbent gerrymanders and would be loath to
upset
their own apple carts.

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