Ielected Future on the lines
t was as if by magic. But it merely served as a testament to what
partisan politicians can do in their self-interest when they put their minds to it.
It is nothing more than politics as usual, something they all do, as any self-interested partisan politician will remind you.
The state’s 135 legislative districts have been redrawn to conform to a major population shift in the last decade. After a period of public comment, the maps will become law.
The state’s rural southern, eastern and north-central areas lost population while northwest Arkansas, mainly Benton and Washington counties, exploded at a nationally pace-setting level.
So, it came to be that the state Board of Apportionment—Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Secretary of State John Thurston—was charged with redrawing those legislative districts, 100 in the House and 35 in the Senate.
Somehow, only three incumbent House legislators have been forced into the same district in this new plan. And all of those are in one uncommonly expansive and lowly populated area in the southeastern corner of the state. It’s as if the mappers did everything they wanted except for that southeastern corner, and cleaned up all the messes there.
Betty Dickey, the veteran Republican and former state Supreme Court justice who was hired to direct the staff that did the work, said straight out in her public presentation of the plan on Friday that one strong consideration was protecting incumbents. The people had elected them, and that warranted the board’s respect, she said.
I asked her afterward what she based that principle on. She produced a pamphlet containing redistricting criteria put out by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
That’s legislators trying to protect legislators. And it’s defensible only if protecting legislators serves the actually legitimate interest of trying to draw districts of common interest, as you could argue it does.
But it’s done as legislative self-interest, not constitutional principle.
It’s not an unconstitutional principle either. Extreme gerrymandering can draw legal challenge, but simply drawing vaguely logical districts in the controlling party’s interest that manage not to put two sitting legislators together … that was emphasized for a century by Democrats in Arkansas and it’s been the intent state-bystate for as long as memory holds.
Attorney General Rutledge brought in a year ago a special aide to begin trying to oblige all Republican legislative requests for protecting their districts. Until he left to run for lieutenant governor, longtime state GOP chairman Doyle Webb held that highly paid public position.
Hiring him to a public position coordinating political redistricting was like putting striped shirts on the first dozen persons entering the stadium wearing hog hats Saturday and authorizing them to officiate the game against Mississippi State.
But none of that is to say that the Board of Apportionment didn’t get in a dig or two at Democrats.
In Springdale, Rep. Megan Godfrey, a Democrat, has served two terms owing largely to strong support she has received from the Latino and Hispanic community in her district. She speaks Spanish fluently, coordinates English language instruction for minority students in the Fayetteville schools and successfully championed bipartisan legislation to aid the Latino community.
If you were to rank rising Democratic stars in Arkansas … well, there are none right now. But, if you were forced to come up with a list, Godfrey would warrant lofty mention. Or would have until Friday. The Board of Apportionment boasts that its new plan manages to create the first Latino-majority House district. That’s historic and a happy occasion. What’s significant is that the new district entails the constituency delivering Godfrey’s margins of victories, and she is now surgically removed from it, dangled in a district starting in Springdale and headed to unfriendly Republican Benton County.
An independent commission would be better. It could well consider incumbent protection in its criteria. But it likely wouldn’t deliberately protect all Republican incumbents while saying, oops, Megan, we’ve spared you a district with an incumbent in it, but, gosh, we had to cut your base out from under you in drawing nobly this historic new majority-Latino district.
One other partisan factor bears mentioning. The Republican Board’s redrawing state Senate districts in population-declining southwest Arkansas without putting incumbents together needs an asterisk.
Larry Teague of Nashville was the lone remaining Democratic senator in that area. But he is term-limited. So, the board simply wiped out his district and carved it up as necessary to plug in population for Republican-incumbent districts of president pro tem Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana and angry right-wing extremist Trent Garner of El Dorado.
Hutchinson reportedly had an idea to put Garner, his extremist menace, into a district favoring Hickey. But Rutledge and Thurston, facing Republican primaries next year requiring extremist right-wing allegiance, blocked him.
“The governor,” someone whispered to me when I asked who was losing in the new maps.