Virginia GOP cautioned by California Republicans about redistricting commission

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by Kerry Picket | WASHINGTON EXAMINER

California Republicans and conservative activists warned their Virginia brethren that an independent commission to draw the state’s district lines is risky and could consign the party to the minority for years.

Virginia’s Democratic majority in the legislature passed legislation Friday that would put on the ballot this November a constitutional referendum to would create an appointed independent commission in charge of redrawing the state’s district maps after the 2020 census.

If voters in November approve the constitutional amendment, the power to draw districts will shift from the General Assembly to a 16-member bipartisan commission, including four lawmakers from each party, and eight private citizens of the commonwealth. Should the commission come to an impasse, the Supreme Court of Virginia is expected to be the final arbiter.

Despite the proposed bipartisan makeup of the commission, conservatives say Republicans in Virginia are setting themselves up for a disaster, saying the independent redistricting commissions have been tried in states like California and Arizona and are not as fair as they seem.

“Independent redistricting commissions never are [independent]. They’re always tools of the Left — always. There are no examples to the contrary,” Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney and president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.

In 2011, one year after California’s state legislature shifted power to draw state lines from state legislators to a redistricting commission, Pro Publica published a piece with the headline: “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission.”

Pro Publica detailed how the Democratic Party managed to seize power within the state’s redistricting commission while making it seem throughout the process that the makeup of the commission would be fair and equitable to everybody involved.

For example, California’s citizen-based commission promised to lay out districts based on testimony from those who lived in the community as opposed to statewide party officials. According to Pro Publica, California Democrats covertly recruited labor union members, local voters, local elected officials, and community organizations to testify before the commission on behalf of the state party’s interests when it came to drawing up district lines.

With the help of the political data consultant who helped Democrats surreptitiously draw the maps in 2011, California’s Republican congressional delegation plunged from 19 members at the time of the commission’s creation to seven today.

“The districts that were designed, if you look at the number of Republicans in California relative to Democrats and you look at the total vote, it seems out of kilter,” Rep. Ken Calvert, a California Republican, told the Washington Examiner. “In other words, there are only seven Republicans in the House Republican delegation out of 53 members, but the vote is probably closer to about 28%. So based on that analysis, you should have around 12 or 13 or 14 members.”

Calvert cautioned Virginia’s GOP, “They ought to look at this very cautiously and see how it’s designed and how it’s put together — put a lot of oversight on it because it didn’t work out so well in California.”

And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, told the Washington Examiner that while he was not familiar with Virginia’s commission proposal, he thinks changes are necessary in California’s line-drawing process.

“Well, I think there’s revision we need within [California’s commission] … I think there needs accountability within it,” he said.

Virginia’s independent commission would also have eight citizens serving on its 16-person panel commission as well.

But Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is skeptical these citizen commission members would be neutral.

“Independent commissions are almost always not independent. In fact, the history of these commissions, if you look, for example, at the California one or the one in Arizona, is that they draw partisan lines,” von Spakovksy told the Washington Examiner.

“The idea that you’re going to get nonpartisans as commissioners is just simply not true. Whatever so-called citizens get picked are going to have a partisan view, because we don’t have folks in this country who are totally neutral,” he said. “Everybody leans one way politically or not. And what this does is it takes away the accountability of legislators.”