Leading Off
●Pennsylvania: After months of stonewalling a redistricting reform proposal, a committee in Pennsylvania's Republican-dominated state Senate has unanimously sent a compromise bill to the floor that would create a new bipartisan commission to handle both congressional and legislative redistricting. This proposal would create an 11-member commission whose members would be appointed by the governor and legislative leaders from both parties and who would each have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the legislature.
Campaign ActionThe commission would consist of four Democrats, four Republicans, and three unaffiliated members, and it would take at least two votes from each bloc and seven votes overall to pass a map. The proposal would also impose criteria that set a hard limit on dividing counties and municipalities, prioritize compactness, and ban the consideration of any political data unless necessary to comply with federal voting rights law.
To put this amendment before voters for their ultimate approval, legislators would first have to pass it with simple majorities both this year and in the 2019-2020 legislative session. Therefore, the soonest it might be on the ballot would be some time after the 2018 elections.
Pennsylvania doesn't allow citizens to propose constitutional amendments of their own, so because such an amendment has to come out of the legislature, it’s unsurprising that lawmakers have insisted on retaining a say in the system they’ve proposed to replace the current one. But while this plan is better than the current approach of letting the legislators draw the next congressional map on their own, it might not be an improvement over the likely outcome of next decade's remap.
That's because Pennsylvania's majority-Democratic state Supreme Court used the state constitution's guarantee of "free and equal" elections to strike down the GOP's congressional gerrymander earlier this year. But they replaced it with a map that didn't just ignore partisan data: The justices actively tried to ensure the party that wins the most votes also wins the most seats—in other words, they tried to implement a map that's actually fair.