Lately we’ve heard a lot from Democrats about GOP dirty tricks. Topping their complaints is the claim that Republicans have weaponized the drawing of electoral districts to their advantage. But a recent attempt at gerrymandering in New Jersey is a reminder that Dems, too, have a penchant for ruthless power politics.
New Jersey state Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, both Democrats, came up with a plan that would have amended the state Constitution to give them more power in drawing up districts.
The scheme would have required a quarter of all districts to be “competitive.” It defined that term to mean that the districts must be within five percentage points of the state average, calculated based on the results of statewide races in the past decade. In practice, that would have given the Dems, who already vastly outnumber Republicans in Jersey, the power to redraw boundaries to give themselves what could have amounted to a permanent supermajority in the Legislature.
The plan provoked bitter protests from Garden State Republicans but also from Gov. Phil Murphy and many national liberal activists like former Attorney General Eric Holder, who rightly understood that Jersey Democrats were undermining liberal arguments about GOP perfidy.
In the end, Sweeney and Coughlin put their scheme on hold only two days before a scheduled vote. Anti-gerrymandering activists claimed a victory for virtue. But the complaints from some northern New Jersey Democrats that the plan might dilute their comfortable majorities to further undermine the GOP elsewhere provided a more plausible explanation for the walk-back.
Voters can breathe a sigh of relief that New Jersey politicians haven’t written yet another sorry chapter in the state’s long history of shady practices. But this should also alter the conversation about who is rigging the system.
Republicans have worked to maximize their advantages in drawing districts in many states. In Wisconsin and Michigan recently, GOP-controlled legislatures have also passed lame-duck laws cutting back the power of their states’ governors — just after Democrats were elected to replace Republicans in those offices.
Wisconsin Republicans argued they were trying to constrain the overweening administrative state, but that doesn’t explain why they waited until GOP Gov. Scott Walker had only weeks left in office before enacting their reforms.
As we’ve just seen in New Jersey, Democrats can play similar games. Indeed, the liberal base is demanding they do so, because in this hyper-partisan era, they think President Trump and the Republicans are so awful that all means are justifiable so long as they help Democrats win.
Gerrymandering is often the preferred route for both parties. It’s named after Elbridge Gerry, our fifth vice president, who tried to put in the fix on the Massachusetts Legislature. Gerrymandering, then, has existed since the earliest years of the republic.
If Democrats have been hurt more by it in recent decades, it is the fault of courts that interpreted the Voting Rights Act to require more majority-minority districts that would elect African-American or Hispanic members. That meant draining competitive districts of minority voters, who usually vote for Democrats. The ironic twist was that the court decisions also created more safe Republican districts.
New Jersey has now reminded us that there is no ploy so transparently cynical that either party wouldn’t stoop to use.
For all of the righteous indignation we’re hearing from the left about the subject, we’d have to forget everything we know about American political history and human psychology to believe that either party would ever pass on a chance to unfairly hobble the other side.
That’s why Republicans have every right to be as suspicious about efforts to eliminate other safeguards — such as requiring photo identification or cleaning up outdated voting rolls — as Democrats are about gerrymandering.
Neither party has a monopoly on virtue or vice. That’s why we need more, not fewer, laws that monitor voter integrity as well as other efforts — including spiking blatantly unfair gerrymanders — to ensure that the system isn’t gamed in a way that predetermines the outcome of fair elections.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.