The plan for redistricting North Carolina has been presented and, as WaPo reports, is quite peculiar – with bipartisan support, no less:
A North Carolina state senate district recently sprouted a mysterious new appendage that just happens to encompass a lawmaker’s second home. The extension, and the bipartisan approval it won in the GOP-led state legislature, is a classic example of the backroom dealing that happens when lawmakers are allowed to draw their own legislative boundaries. …
But allowing legislatures to draw their own boundaries invites and encourages self-interested behavior among legislators: Republicans and Democrats get together to divvy up a state’s voters with a primary aim of protecting incumbents across the board
The North Carolina district with the brand new appendage vividly illustrates the point. At issue is the border, in the Fayetteville area, between Senate District 21, held by Democrat Ben Clark, and Senate District 19, home to Republican Wesley Meredith. The old map, drawn in 2011, was a sprawling, aggressively gerrymandered beast, with multiple tentacles extending from Hoke County into neighboring Fayetteville.
After courts ordered the districts to be redrawn, Clark initially supported a Democratic plan that would have drawn a fairly straightforward line between the two districts. But the Republican supermajority on the committee voted down that plan in favor of their own map with a more convoluted border.
And, to my mind, it’s not so much self-interest as much as conflict of interest. Of course, when these sorts of things occur, we expect the judiciary to reprimand the Legislature and, in extreme cases, do the redrawing themselves. But is this going to work out so well in an era when the judiciary itself is becoming politicized? I particularly worry about a judge that is subject to elections; while an appointed judge, as we’ve discussed before, can certainly have been selected on partisan grounds, once beyond the bounds of legitimate pressure, they may become distinctly un-partisan.
And while history has a number of examples of appointed judges losing their partisan characters, these days I’m not so sure. The ideologies have become extreme on the right that I wonder if an extremist can become a responsible judge. The brain-washing that everyone outside of their little clique is wrong makes me quite nervous.
