Every so often these days, a political headline literally takes your breath away.
The latest stunner was that former Republican Gov. Scott Walker was joining the fight over corrupt political gerrymandering. We know politicians can undergo some pretty radical transformations after they’re thrown out of office, but was Walker really joining the growing national movement fighting against the brazenly dishonest Republican tactics he used in Wisconsin to make it one of the most politically gerrymandered states in the nation?
No, of course not. Anyone who read the story quickly realized Walker had no intention of fighting the corrupt gerrymandering that jammed Wisconsin’s Democratic voters into the fewest possible voting districts statewide so they could never elect a majority of state legislators or congressional representatives. He’s fighting to protect corrupt political gerrymandering.
Walker is becoming the fundraising chairman for something called the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a rightwing organization created to finance Republican resistance to a national citizens’ movement to take redistricting out of the self-serving hands of professional politicians, either Republican or Democrat.
That’s because politicians have proven they can’t be trusted to draw voting districts fairly to reflect the will of the voters. Instead, they manipulate lines shamelessly to keep as many members of their own party as possible in the Legislature and in Congress. Exhibit A is Wisconsin in every election under Walker as governor, including last November’s midterms.
But wait a minute. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers beat Walker in that election. In fact, enthusiasm for Democrats was so high they swept every statewide election. That’s because it’s impossible to gerrymander statewide elections. The candidates who receive the most votes win. That’s the way democracy is supposed to work.
Thwarting the Voters of Wisconsin
But that’s not how it works in dishonestly gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts. Here’s how district lines were manipulated to destroy the actual intentions of Wisconsin’s voters. Because anti-Trump and anti-Walker sentiment energized Democrats and independents in the midterms, Democrats won 53% of Assembly votes statewide, but what the majority of voters wanted didn’t matter. Many of those votes for Democrats were rendered totally meaningless through “packing and cracking.” Democratic voters were either packed into the fewest possible overwhelmingly Democratic districts or scattered into so many majority Republican districts they literally had no effect.
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Through this sleight of hand, a 53% statewide majority of Democratic votes produced an absurdly lopsided Republican Assembly majority of 63 Republican seats and only 36 seats for Democrats. A similar Democratic majority of congressional voters statewide maintained the state congressional delegation’s five-to-three Republican majority.
Republicans don’t even have to be legislative geniuses to accomplish such upside-down outcomes. Sophisticated computer programs now exist to automatically draw the most dishonest possible voting districts at the touch of a button. Wisconsin Republicans hired a private law firm to do that dirty deed behind closed doors.
Political redistricting is required to reflect population changes after each new census at the beginning of every decade. The racist 2010 tea party backlash that elected Walker and other rightwing extremists around the country after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama was perfectly timed for Republican gerrymandering to reduce the chances of Democrats winning elections for the next 10 years.
GOP Afraid to Lose
But Republicans are still embarrassed to admit publicly they’re afraid of holding fair elections in a democracy. So, how in the world was Walker going to explain away his support for corrupt political gerrymandering?
No problem. Walker simply adopted the official Republican strategy perfected by their leader: just lie your head off on Twitter. Walker tweeted it was his honor to lead the Republican defense “as we counter the efforts of the far Left to try and gerrymander their way into permanent control of the Congress and state legislative bodies across the country. Republicans win if we have fair maps!” He even ended the tweet with one of Donald Trump’s exciting exclamation points.
Not a single word was true. Republicans have no interest in fair maps. The extreme gerrymandering by Wisconsin Republicans was cited before the U.S. Supreme Court as one of the worst examples in American history of distorting the intentions of a state’s voters. The Supreme Court made no decision in that case. Now, the current court is unlikely to ever outlaw corrupt gerrymandering with the addition of former Republican political operative Brett Kavanaugh as Trump’s long-lasting insult to the nation.
The best news for Wisconsin is that Evers now will have veto power over any corrupt redistricting map created by Republican legislators after the 2020 census. In his budget, Evers proposed creation of an independent, non-partisan commission to draw legislative and congressional voting districts after the new census.
Non-partisan citizen commissions are the solution being demanded by Americans appalled by corrupt political gerrymandering. In November, voters in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado and Utah approved independent commissions, joining California, Arizona and Ohio.
Out-of-work, corrupt former Republican governors with gerrymandering experience need not apply.
