David Michael Miller
Rep. Kathy Bernier said what she said, and WisconsinEye captured it on video.
At a board meeting of Common Cause in Wisconsin in February 2013, the Republican lawmaker from Chippewa Falls, who chairs the Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections, was asked whether she would allow a hearing on calls to reform redistricting, the redrawing of voter boundaries after each 10-year census.
“I see no problem with that,” Bernier told the group. She even expressed discomfort with how the last redistricting was done, saying “There has to be a better way.”
Fast-forward to 2015. Bernier now sees all kinds of problems with holding a hearing, as she is being pressured to do, on a mostly Democrat-backed bill before her committee to turn the task of redistricting over to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.
Her committee, Bernier says in an interview, already has a lot of things on its plate. The Democrats who unveiled the bill “blindsided me” by dredging up her past remarks. She notes that the Common Cause meeting was “two and a half years ago” and now questions the interpretation of what she said. “I don’t know if you could call that a pledge or a promise.”
Moreover, Bernier calls it “absolute hypocrisy” for Democrats to seek changes now, after failing to do so when they controlled the Legislature, prior to the 2010 election. Back then, she says, “Democrats were hoping they would have a solid majority” so they could use redistricting to their own advantage. They only objected after Republicans took control.
“Part of this is pure politics,” Bernier asserts.
One of the new bill’s sponsors, Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay), has called his party’s failure to act when it had the chance a “mistake,” one that neither party should repeat.
In a Sept. 17 letter to Democratic lawmakers seeking a hearing, Bernier said it was “unlikely” her committee would have time to take up their bill in the 2015-2016 session. But she is “open to the possibility of holding an informal hearing after the fall session period.”
“I’m not putting it at the top of my list,” Bernier tells Isthmus. “It’s going to go with all of the other things on my list.” These include the need, mandated by court decisions, to rewrite the state’s campaign finance laws and the push by Republicans for what Bernier calls “GAB reform” — restructuring of the Government Accountability Board to make it more accountable to the politicians it is supposed to regulate.
Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit), the bill’s lead Assembly sponsor, disputes that Bernier’s committee faces a workload “so overwhelming that they can’t make time for this.” He thinks a hearing will help clarify the issue: “If other Republicans think it is a bad idea, they should say so and say why.”
That the debate over redistricting comes down to trying to force Republicans to allow a hearing underscores what a huge challenge its proponents face.
In the last session, 2013-2014, a bill calling for nonpartisan redistricting, essentially identical to the one introduced early this month, was assigned to a different committee than the one headed by Bernier and did not get a hearing, despite a concerted statewide campaign led by media editorial boards.
Frustrated, two of the bill’s supporters in the state Senate, Democrat Tim Cullen and Republican Dale Schultz, held an informal hearing in a packed meeting room in the state Capitol in February 2014. Attendees heard from officials in Iowa, which has used a widely admired process of nonpartisan redistricting since 1981.
Schultz, since retired, told the crowd this was a battle citizens must lead. “This is going to be a bottom-up solution,” he said. “It will not come out of this building. It will come from all of you.”
The lone Republican supporter of the new bill is Rep. Todd Novak, a freshman lawmaker from Dodgeville. Novak did not respond to multiple interview requests. But Matt Rothschild of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, one of the groups backing the bill, says he spoke with Novak and is impressed with his commitment to principle.
“He doesn’t think the current system makes sense, and he stands up for what he believes,” says Rothschild, who hopes other Republicans will join the cause.
Also assigned to Bernier’s committee is a Democrat-sponsored resolution calling for an advisory referendum on whether the state should adopt nonpartisan redistricting. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, which backs the redistricting bill, is not taking a position on the referendum.
“The risk is greater than the potential gain,” says executive director Andrea Kaminski. If the referendum passes, lawmakers are free to ignore it. One the other hand, interest groups with money could potentially “run a few ads that distort what the referendum is about” and defeat it.
Allowing partisans to pull the levers of the redistricting process has an almost narcotic appeal. In the past, this task was performed in Wisconsin by politically divided Legislatures, with the courts eventually stepping in to redraw the maps. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers ran the show.
To maximize partisan advantage, districts are drawn to pack as many of the minority party’s voters into as few districts as possible, while the majority party’s voters are strategically allocated to create a small but sure edge in a maximum number of other districts. New computer mapping technologies let politicians pick their voters with astonishing precision.
In the 2012 elections, Republicans won five of the state’s eight congressional seats, reclaimed control of the state Senate and secured a 60- to-39-seat edge in the Assembly — despite getting fewer votes statewide than Democrats. An analysis by Wisconsin Public Television found that the predictions of partisan mapmakers in the more than 50 GOP-held Assembly seats facing Democratic challengers that year were accurate, on average, to within a single percentage point. The redistricting process, conducted in secret, cost taxpayers more than $2 million.
Jay Heck of Common Cause thinks Republicans are disinclined to give the issue any attention. “If they can quietly sit on it, their calculation is that it will go away,” he muses, adding that he disagrees. “As long as they keep this bottled up, they’re only going to face more pressure.”
An analysis by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found that virtually all of the hundreds of emails and other contacts on redistricting received by Republican legislative leaders during a brief period in 2013 supported reform. Virtually no one urged the Legislature to continue a system that lets the party in power manipulate the process to its advantage.
Bernier has no doubt that proponents of redistricting would be able to “rally the troops” if a hearing were held. But, she adds, “I can say with certainty that most of the people in the state of Wisconsin don’t care one way or the other about legislative redistricting, to tell you the truth.” She says “not one person” has raised the issue in a serious way in her listening sessions with constituents.
And even if a hearing does take place, Bernier doubts she has the “political clout” with fellow Republicans to advance the issue. She says she and Rep. Novak discussed this last week: “We’re pretty certain it’s not going to go anywhere anyway.”
