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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Who is the biggest gerrymander-er in Wisconsin?
You might argue it’s the Republicans who control the state legislature. After all, in Wisconsin the legislature, not a commission of retired judges, draws the maps. But you’d be wrong. The biggest gerrymader-er in the state is our governor, Tony Evers. You might be surprised to learn that every political district, every voting boundary, was drawn by our Governor. In some cases the governor drew the lines on his own – no outside input from anyone.
So, the Governor, who doesn’t like the results under the maps he drew, called a special session of the state legislature. Republicans usually gavel-in and gavel-out. This time they’re open to talks with the governor.
Republicans voted on and passed the Evers maps because they would have gotten even worse treatment from the state supreme court. Those liberal clowns in robes see themselves as a super-legislature.
The state constitution does not give the courts a role in map-making. It’s a power the justices seized for themselves when it appeared the governor and the legislature were unlikely to reach an agreement before an election cycle was to begin. And the supreme court immediately called in experts who talked about vote packing, a fundamentally false principle. That’s the theory that democrats always vote for democrats and republicans always vote for republicans. That’s simply not true. It also also assumes that the political make-up of communities never changes. Wausau disproves that. They city used to be staunchly conservative; now it’s distinctly purple.
The public narrative is that republicans, because they hold 6 of the state’s 8 congressional seats, must have drawn biased maps. Hogwash. Democrats are worse. Consider the “Snyder notch” in the 85th assembly district. For a two block area in Schofield, there’s a notch in the map. That just happens to be the area were State Representative Pat Snyder lives. The map was intentionally drawn to move his house into a Wausau district – making it harder for him to win. He won anyway.
The only thing the state constitution says about Wisconsin’s voting districts is that they must be contiguous and that they must have the same number of voters. Everything else is just politics.
Chris Conley
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