Author: Marc Stier

From Third and State We have various ideas about what real redistricting reform looks like. But we agree that this proposal is not it. We urge Speaker Turzai not to advance this proposal in the remaining days of the legislature this year. If he does, we urge the General Assembly to reject it for three reasons. Speaker Turzai has recently floated a proposal for legislation to delegate the process of drawing congressional district lines to a commission modeled after the process used for drawing legislative districts that is embedded in the PA Constitution. The legislative districting commission consists of one member appointed by the majority and minority caucuses and fifth member appointed by those four. If they cannot agree on a fifth member, according to the PA Constitution, the Supreme Court chooses that person. First, we note that there is absolutely no rush to advance a legislative proposal in the… Continue reading

From Third and State, July 15, 2018 The first rule of politics, like that of medicine, is do no harm. And the intention to do no harm is not enough, you need a strategy to ensure that your actions actually avoid doing harm directly or indirectly. Once again, Fair Districts PA (FDPA) and March on Harrisburg, in two separate ways, are potentially doing harm to our political system in Pennsylvania.  FDPA and March on Harrisburg have been protesting Governor Wolf, demanding that he call the PA General Assembly back for a special session to pass a redistricting constitutional amendment before the clock runs out sometime this month.  I will point out in a moment that the focus on Governor Wolf is misplaced and potentially dangerous. But the deeper problem is that calling the General Assembly back into session makes no sense if you don’t have a reasonable goal for them… Continue reading

From Third and State, June 18, 2018 Representative democracy in Pennsylvania is under attack. This week, on a straight party-line vote, Republican senators passed a constitutional amendment that would give the majority party in the General Assembly a strikingly unprecedented degree of influence over who is elected to our courts, including the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In turn, that would undermine the checks and balances in our state government — including those that have blocked, and would block in the future, the Republicans from tilting the rules of our democracy in their favor. This new action taken by our heavily gerrymandered state Senate is one more step in a slow-motion coup by which Republicans are seeking to change the political rules to give them control over our state government without having to be bothered to win more votes in fair elections. It follows the enactment of Voter ID laws that would… Continue reading

From Third and State, June 12, 2018 Republicans today added a second constitutional amendment to, in effect, gerrymander the Supreme Court to a bill, SB22, that proposed a constitutional amendment to stop gerrymandering of the congressional and state legislative elections. The Supreme Court gerrymandering amendment passed on a party line vote. And it means that today all supporters of redistricting reform, including PBPC, withdrew support for SB22 and tomorrow all Democrats will likely vote against  it. We do not yet know what the prospects for SB22 are in the House, but we will join other groups in working to defeat it. There are some better signs today. PBPC and other groups have been pointing to flaws in the SB22 as amended by Senator Folmer. Those flaws are technical and difficult for many people to understand. But today Senator Vince Hughes put forward an amendment that fixed those flaws and it… Continue reading

From Third and State, June 11, 2018 Update Monday June 11, 11:00 am Some advocacy groups are supporting an omnibus amendment from Senator Folmer and others. It makes some small improvements to SB22 and deals with the finality issue I mention below. (point 4). But it does not deal with SB22’s fundamental structural issues which will enable the majority party to continue to gerrymander congressional and state legislative districts. Thus, we continue to urge that SB22 be restored to its original form. And if not, it should be defeated. As we have pointed out elsewhere, defeating SB22 in its current form does not mean the end of redistricting reform. The House can pass HB2402, which is the same as the original version of SB22, and send it to the Senate. The best elements of SB22 can be enacted as legislation and applied to the current redistricting process. And we all can,… Continue reading

From Third and State, June 5, 2018 We at the PBPC have been very critical of the effort to pass SB22, a constitutional amendment to change the way legislative districts for both Congressional and state legislative races are drawn, as it was recently amended in the state government committee. But that’s not because we don’t favor an independent redistricting commission that would create fair, nonpartisan districts. We are very much in favor of a nonpartisan independent redistricting commission. There are very good, strategic options for securing a constitutional amendment, or the best parts of the current SB22, through legislation this year or very soon without supporting SB22 as it stands now. But we object to a political strategy that runs the very real risk of giving us another decade or more of gerrymandered districts, especially one that allows the Republican majority to claim credit for creating a better redistricting process when they have, in… Continue reading