Tommy Washbush / Freepik
A crude trap with "Fair Maps" written on the box.
On the surface it looks like a win for Democrats, so why are they rejecting it?
A few weeks ago Assembly Speaker Robin Vos shocked everybody by suddenly endorsing something he's fought for almost two decades. Vos introduced a bill that would adopt what is essentially the nonpartisan redistricting process that has been used in Iowa.
Democrats, good government groups and newspaper editorial boards have been clamoring for this forever, so why weren't they happy? Vos, Republicans and some editorial boards argue that the Democrats figure they'll get a better deal out of the new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court then they would from the process they previously said they wanted.
I doubt that. What the court is likely to do is rule in favor of maps that look a lot like the ones created by Evers' People's Maps Commission. Those maps reduced the projected GOP majority in the Assembly to 55-44, compared to the 63-36 advantage they enjoy now. Any nonpartisan process is likely to produce maps that generate that kind of outcome. So, there's really no reason to think that the court will do any better by the Democrats than an Iowa-style process would.
Vos might be pushing to adopt this process for the redistricting that will take place in 2031 as a way of short-circuiting a new set of maps for 2024. Unless he can do this as part of an out-of-court settlement with the groups suing for fair maps now I don't see how that can happen. And if you were one of the groups suing, why would you take that deal unless you had some doubt about prevailing in court? I see no such doubt.
Democrats have every reason to be suspicious of Vos. For one thing, this comes from a man not known for his commitment to fair play and good government. For another, Vos forced this to a vote in the Assembly within a couple days of introduction with no referral to committee or public hearings. (It did get a hearing last week in the Senate.) And most importantly, his bill contained a fatal flaw. If the Legislature or governor rejects two attempts at map-drawing from the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau, they're free to adopt their own. In other words, we'd be right back in the gerrymander soup.
Iowa's constitution specifically makes its Supreme Court the final arbiter in such an impasse. Vos says that, while his bill doesn't make that clear, the courts are the de facto deciders here anyway. If that's true, then why not spell it out in the bill?
But here's the bigger issue. All of this depends on some degree of trust and some of that squishy stuff that passes under names like good will and respect for the institution. In other words, things that are in short supply these days.
Because, no matter how you play this out, ultimately it comes down to your faith that somebody at the end of the process will do the right thing, the fair thing, the thing that's good for the long-run best interests of the people and their institutions — even if it doesn't suit the interests of their own political tribe at the moment.
If we adopt the Iowa model all problems are not solved. Artificial Intelligence will not spit out maps that will be automatically adopted. Human "intelligence" and everything else that comes with it will make the final decisions. We have a pretty good idea about what's going to happen with this Supreme Court right now. It's very likely we'll have new maps in place in time for elections a year from now and they'll look an awful lot like the People's Maps product.
But what will happen in 2031 and 2041 and all the redistricting years after that if we do adopt the Iowa model for the future? If both houses of the Legislature and the governor's office are controlled by the same party — and our political culture remains the same as it is today — you can expect that that party will reject the nonpartisan maps and adopt their own gerrymandered ones. And if the Supreme Court is controlled by that same party — and again if nothing in the political culture changes — that court will find that those rigged maps are perfectly legal.
In fact, had we had the Iowa model in 2011, this is exactly what probably would have happened. Because Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature, the governor’s office and the Supreme Court, they likely would have burned through two LRB versions and then adopted just what we have now and the high court would have allowed it.
The answer might be divided government, but in that case we just have to hope that different parties control the different branches in redistricting years. There’s no guarantee of that.
I can think of two changes in our political culture, not the system, that have led us to this point. It used to be said that when it came to redistricting there was only one party: the incumbent party. Legislators would take care to keep incumbents of either party in their own districts and relatively safe from serious challenge. This was not a great practice, but it was a heck of a lot better than the extreme partisan gerrymandering we have today.
The other change was on the Supreme Court. Up until about 2008, there were justices who shaded liberal or conservative, but there wasn't the clear, raw partisanship that we have now. Today we don't have four justices with an overall more liberal judicial philosophy and three with a more conservative general point of view. We have four Democrats and three Republicans and they're expected to vote along party lines on major issues.
So, we can adopt the Iowa model, but it might not matter if our political culture doesn't improve. Nobody can devise a system that doesn't, at some point, fall back on a sense of fairness, or at least of enlightened self-interest, on the part of the players at the time. A more fair system only goes so far. Decent people are still required to run it.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
