By Chris Satullo
No one has ever mistaken the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for a model of wise jurisprudence. (Electing judges, never a good idea.) But the state’s high court has a chance to do something spectacular this week.
It has a chance to choose a new congressional district map for Pennsylvania that will shatter the state’s sordid habit of partisan gerrymandering and strike a blow for that quaint idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people. The court can throw another shovelful of dirt on the enraging notion that politicians should get to pick their voters, rather than the other way around.
Here’s what’s up: To the surprise of absolutely no attentive observer, the state’s General Assembly and governor have failed their assignment to agree upon a map laying out the boundaries of the 17 U.S. House districts the state was apportioned after the 2020 Census. That’s down one seat from what the state had from 2012 to 2020, because its population growth was pokey compared to many Sun Belt states, who gained seats compared to the previous Census.
I could cite a sadly large pile of reasons why this failure to agree on a congressional map was entirely predictable. I’ll settle for a few:
First, because of the lost seat, some incumbent is losing his or her job; each political party wants to make sure that poor shlub belongs to the other party.
Second, lame-duck Gov. Tom Wolf and the legislature’s rabid Republican leadership could not agree that the sky is blue, even if you paid them all a million bucks.
Third, Donald Trump. As you may have heard, and I’m not exaggerating here, his minions in Congress and state capitols across the land are hard at work laying the groundwork for pulling off the coup d’etat in 2024 that the Jan. 6 insurrection failed to accomplish in 2021. If Trump doesn’t win the next presidential election fair and square, the plan is to hand him the Oval Office anyhow by claiming a disputed result that the U.S. House would have to resolve. In that scenario, the House would choose the president, with each state’s delegation getting one vote. So, as you can see, controlling a majority of PA’s 17 seats becomes crucial for either executing or foiling this plan. No tactic, no matter how underhanded or unconstitutional, is off the table when it comes to making way for the Return of the Donald.
This just adds juice to Pennsylvania Republicans’ 20-year history of already being some of the most blatant gerrymanderers in the history of the Republic.
A gerrymander, in case you missed that day in civics class, is an election map drawn so as to skew results to favor one party or class of candidates (i.e. incumbents). In 2001, PA got a GOP gerrymander so extreme the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which punted. In 2011, they were at it again, producing a legendarily grotesque map that, in a state where D’s hold a 4 million to 3.4 million registration edge (with 1.3 independents), ensured the GOP would win 13 out of 18 seats, over and over, no sweat.
The elected state Supreme Court, suddenly chockablock with Democrats after some very costly, seamy judicial elections, tossed out that Republican gerrymander in 2018, replacing it with a professor-drawn map that was pretty fair. Presto-chango, in the first election held with that map, the Dems took nine seats, the GOP eight. In other words, actually reflective of how the state voted, without all Democratic votes being packed into a couple of deep blue districts.
Now, having elected judges impose maps that just happen to favor candidates of the party that the judges belong to is not ideal, but was a step up from being stuck with a full-bore gerrymander whose weirdly shaped districts had become a global emblem of partisan overreach.
Which brings us to this moment:
The fate of the map is back in the hands of the court’s seven justices, after this week they snatched the issue away from a lower appeals court, the more Republican-leaning Commonwealth. (Told you, it’s never pretty when you elect judges.) The rationale for the snatch, which isn’t utter B.S., is that the clock is ticking on this year’s primary elections. It’s time for people to decide if they’re running and to collect signatures for nominating petitions, which is hard to do when you don’t know what your district’s boundaries look like. And, recall, the map the court imposed in 2018 no longer can be used, because it has one too many districts now.
The Commonwealth Court had received a Kentucky Derby-sized field of proposed maps, 13 in all, which are all now passed along to the high court.
And here’s where the seven justices face a fork in a road.
They can pick a map that was designed by powerful politicians in Pennsylvania, doing the same things partisan pols do every time they hold the pen: use their sophisticated computer software to wrangle every advantage they can, big and small, out of the maps, trying to ensure that they will control the congressional delegation for the next 10 years.
Each one of those maps will be skewed, bad, partisan in its own. Picking any one of them will make the court look partisan, high-handed, out of control.
But for the first time in history, thanks to new, open-source digital tech and a lot of fervent grassroots energy over the last four years, the court also has before it a different group of maps. These seven maps have been drawn by different citizen groups taking advantage of free mapping software that just became available in recent years. Three do have some partisan tilt, either red or blue, but are still sound.
Now for those other four citizen maps: Their guiding star is not “my side has to win.” Instead, they aim to provide districts that are compact, respect county boundaries and communities of interest, and are fair to voters.
What does “fair to voters” mean? It means a map that encourages a variety of candidates to run, giving voters a real choice, while maximizing the number of voters who have a real chance to influence the result.
Full disclosure here: One of the maps in this last group, called the Citizens Map, was submitted by Draw the Lines PA, an initiative of the Committee of Seventy in Philadelphia. I founded DTL and ran it for three years, before stepping away for personal reasons this year.
So, obviously, I’m biased. But I contend the Citizens Map is the best option for the court to choose, because it is founded upon the input, work and values of thousands of Pennsylvania residents who drew the more than 1,500 maps submitted to DTL’s statewide mapping contests. Plus, this map scores as well as or better than the others on the key established metrics, such as compactness and competitiveness. (That’s why Wolf said last month that, if you don’t like the map he proposed, you should back the DTL map.)
Kudos to my talented friend Justin Villere, who honchoed the fashioning of this fine map, working with a corps of wicked-smart volunteer mappers.
Setting my favoritism aside, the vital point is this: The court should – it must – choose not one of the maps that were drawn by self-interested politicians, but one of the citizen-led submissions that were guided by a North Star of fairness to voters and communities.
Any one of them would be infinitely better than the tired, old business of pols twisting and bending the lines so that they can retain their jobs and power. Any one of them would restore for Pennsylvania, at least a little, a sense of government of the people, by the people, for the people — the Lincolnesque ideal that is tragically at risk of perishing from sea to shining sea.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia