Pa. has chance to get politics out of mapping

When the U.S. House of Representatives convenes for its new session after the first of the year, it will look dramatically different than the one sitting in those seats today.

It will be more diverse. There will be more women. There will be more people of color.

All of that is a good thing. After all, shouldn’t the House of “Representatives” actually represent all the people, not just white males?

Leading this charge was southeastern Pennsylvania, where four women captured seats in Congress as Democrats regained control of the House.

Before November’s midterm election, Pennsylvania had zero women in Washington. Come January there will be four. This was not an accident. There were several factors, including a dramatic backlash against President Donald Trump, and the fallout from the #MeToo movement and the simmering issue of sexual harassment in our society.

But there was another important factor in play in Pennsylvania.

Voters were selecting their representatives according to new boundaries drawn up by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Gone was the poster boy for partisan gerrymandering, otherwise known as the old 7th Congressional District. The 7th was replaced with the 5th under the new map, which put all of Delaware County under one Congressional roof.

In Chester County, Rep. Ryan Costello took one look at the newly constructed 6th District, another that was drawn up to boost the GOP’s chances, and immediately threw in the towel, indicating he would not seek re-election.

Republicans, including Costello, as well as county and state party leaders, complained that the high court had engaged in their own gerrymandering, constructing districts that now tilted toward Democratic candidates.

The election may have made the U.S. House more representative, but it did not solve the problem.

That is because efforts to resolve the inherent problem of having politicians’ hands involved in drawing up districts have consistently fallen short.

A push in the Legislature last year to remove politicians – and judges for that matter – from the redistricting process failed.

Now Gov. Tom Wolf is trying to breathe new life into the idea. He is setting up a commission to look into ways to improve the process. He signed an order creating the Pennsylvania Redistricting Reform Commission, and he named David Thornburgh, who heads the government watchdog group Committee of Seventy, as its chairman. The 15-member panel is comprised of a variety of politicians, experts and advocates. They’ve been tasked with traveling the state to hear ideas on how to make the system work better and reform the process. They’ve got nine months to do it.

Republican leaders are not exactly enamored with the idea. They see this new redistricting push as a way of ignoring rural areas – usually GOP strongholds – in favor of more urban – and Democratic – areas. They believe the governor is grandstanding.

They’re dubious that they will be fairly represented and thus have indicated they will not fill their two slots on the commission. Not exactly an auspicious start.

Every state is required to go through the redistricting process based on the results of the biennial census. The next one will be come in 2021, based on the results of the 2020 census.

Republicans continue to control both chambers in the state Legislature. If they did not care for the boundaries put in place by the high court, now is the time for them to prove it.

As long as politicians continue to have their fingerprints all over these maps, they will continue to tilt toward the party in power. Don’t think for a moment that Democrats would not be doing the same thing if they held the reins of power in Harrisburg.

The solution is to get the politicians out of this equation. An effort to do just that came close before stalling last year.

Now Wolf is looking to give it another shot.

The House of Representatives looks a little more like the people who go to the polls.

That is the way the system is supposed work, right?