Here in Texas there have been some particularly nasty fights over congressional redistricting lately. That got me wondering why redistricting is a legislative power in the first place. Redistricting seems to have the most direct effect on the careers of the legislators, so it seems odd that they would also have that control.
So, my question is, in a government that is supposed to be based on the idea of “checks and balances”, how and when did the legislators get this power? Was this a power that was established constitutionally before anyone realized how much difference it made and how badly it could be abused? Was there any consideration to giving redistricting authority to anyone else? It would make more sense to me to give the power to a supposedly non-partisan group (like the census bureau).
It seems that this would be a legislative power because the legislators are the most directly accountable for their actions. A non-partisan group would never be truly non-partisan, and the very act of giving them this power would make them partisan. That is, appointments to those supposedly non-partisan positions would become very partisan issues when it was time for redistricting.
While it doesn’t answer any of your questions, there was a recent editorial by Dave McNeely in the Austin American Statesman discussing this issue. In particular, he points out that “one’s attitude on whether the legislature or courts should draw the congressional district maps depends a lot on who’s in charge.” The same Republicans who are now pushing for a legislative session to redistrict were advocating redistricting by federal courts when the Democrats were in power and the Democrats who recently fled the state to avoid the issue were claiming it was a legislative duty at that time.
While the redistricting process in some states is very contentious and politicized, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
For example, in Iowa, an independent commission draws up a redistricting plan that the legislature votes on in a straight up-or-down vote (i.e., no significant amendments). (If the Legislative Service Bureau’s plans are rejected three times, then the legislature has to come up with its own plan by September 1 or it goes to the Iowa Supreme Court.)
A redistricting scheme such as Iowa’s also has the advantage of being cheaper than a long drawn-out fight. Iowa’s new districts were signed into law over two years ago on June 22, 2001.
Some voting rights organizations see Iowa’s redistricting process as a model, but I’m not surprised that it hasn’t caught on in other states. Very few politicians are willing to let something as contentious and important as redistricting be done by an independent commission that would ignore “political affiliation, previous election results, [or] the addresses of incumbents”–even if it was cheaper and fairer to do it that way.
In earlier times, it was much less common to delegate legislative powers to independent agencies or the courts. The idea of setting up an agency (like the FEC or FCC) or, at the state level, a judicial board to handle redistricting occurs naturally to us today, but it didn’t at the time when the federal Constitution and many state constitutions were written. Power over redistricting was assigned to the Legislature because it was their job to make laws about everything, including elections.
At the federal level, states have always drawn boundaries for U.S. House districts, so you at least avoid the problem of having legislators define their own districts–although there are still obvious partisan conflicts of interest and a tendency toward “incumbency protection” as the path of least resistance. Also, Congress is charged with determining the allocation of House seats to each state, and this has occasioned many disputes in the past, culminating with a failure to reallocate seats after the Census of 1920.
At the state level, the conflict of interest has always been obvious and direct, but the nature of legislative abuse of this power has changed over time. In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, controversy usually centered on “malapportionment”–over-representation of rural areas as population shifted to cities. The Supreme Court one-person one-vote rulings have eliminated this abuse, just in time for the advent of computer-assisted mapping to shift concern toward partisan gerrymandering and blatant incumbency-protection rackets.
Nowadays we’re more comfortable with delegating “quasi-legislative powers” to independent agencies, and some states have done this with districting, either by law or constitutional amendment. There is a lot of inertia, however, and legislatures are often reluctant to give up this power.
Indianapolis has just gone through a redistricting that was quite interesting. The redistricting had to be designed by the city-county council but the mayor could veto it. The council is nearly evenly split with a slight Republican majority. The major is a Democrat. No council-approved gerrymander would get by the mayor. No gerrymander the mayor would approve of would get by the council. Since redistricting is required by law, it ended up in the Indiana Supreme Court, which drew up districts designed to displease everybody. They used only three criteria:
In short, you need to have a law specifying how districts are set up. The legislature makes laws. Therefore, the state legislature naturally has power over its districts just like it has over every other facet of state government (unless and until it decides to delegate this power elsewhere, such as to an independent commission).
And this problem is not unique to the U.S., the British Parliament has had some even more peculiarly shaped districts than you would see in the U.S. and reforming the system took centuries.