I spent a crisp Saturday morning attending the only St. Louis region meeting of the Senate Independent Bipartisan Citizens Commission, the Missouri Office of Administration’s Redistricting Office group charged with setting new state senate district lines.
First thing I noticed: despite signs at the hotel and county regulation (recently reiterated by the courts), all the state employees lacked face masks.
Second: the crowd overfilled the room, no personal space or social distancing allowed. A room twice as large ought to have been reserved.
Third: if you want to make a Republican redistrictor squirm, attack CVAP.
You see, Citizen Voting Age Population redistricting is a GOP trick to draw districts based not on the total population – as the Constitution and courts require – but by not counting kids, undocumented and other non-citizen residents, prisoners and such…
CVAP redistricting is a part of a long-term Republican ploy to rig our Democracy to help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” according to Republican strategists.
And, of course, Missouri is mentioned along with Texas, Nebraska and Arizona as a CVAP target state by Common Cause.
This should not be a surprise. The party of Kit Bond and Jack Danforth now would limit voting to white guys over age 21 who own property if they could get away with it. Those guys, as a group, tend to, well, “think correctly” and support “America’s true President, Donald R. Trump.” [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/25/poll-quarter-americans-surveyed-say-trump-true-president/7426714002/ ] Avoiding the election of state senators who are not Trumpettes is the primary goal.
Yet, even under the revised rules set up by the Republicans counter to CLEAN Missouri, the state must go through the motions of having both major parties represented on a Citizens Commission.
Then, when that group is predictably deadlocked, the matter goes to the state courts – in Cole County where all the judges are Republicans. (Want to bet lunch money how much the final map looks like what the GOP’s?)
Oh, the public session elicited a lot of good information. The woman sitting next to me, for example, produced her own maps from census data to show the movement of population from rural to suburban Missouri, as well as chart median household income. She pushed for senate districts which looked more at circumstance than party affiliation.
A few speakers pleaded for Ferguson to get a fair shake. The city of 19,000 got sliced into three state representative districts and two senate seats after the 2010 census. With Senate districts needing 177,000 residents keeping Ferguson together ought not to be a problem. (Don’t hold your breath, Ferguson.)
Many folks asked the commission for fair districts created in a transparent process.
Alas, history shows that the GOP wants redistricting to give them every possible edge, be it through CVAP or good old fashioned gerrymandering. They want rural white voters to have more weight than urbanites. They want more than their share of senators.
After three public sessions – where no maps will be shown – the commissioners roll up their sleeves and get too work, deadlocking and thence sending a Republican drawn, flawed map to the courts who reluctantly endorse it. That’s the Missouri way.
Glenn Koenen
Photo source: Common Cause