Democrats in the Washington state legislature are now open to modifying their redistricting laws to allow them to fight back against mid-decade gerrymanders in Republican-controlled states, reported Politico’s Natalie Fertig on Tuesday evening.
“House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon intro’d a bill today that would put a ballot measure to voters allowing mid-decade redistricting in certain situations,” wrote Fertig — a move that reverses their previous refusal to change state redistricting law. “The bill is not expected to pass in this session, but Democrats tell me they’ve introduced it to show what they’ll do if they get a 2/3 majority in the state leg this November. They’re a few seats short of a supermajority in both chambers.”
Under the proposed bill, the state’s independent redistricting commission would still control the process of drawing congressional districts by default — but “inserts [a] trigger clause into the constitution that would let the state redistrict mid-decade **if another state does it first**” reported Fertig.
The trigger clause states that “If any state of the United States redistricts such state’s congressional districts at any point following that state’s adoption of a decennial districting law, but prior to the next decennial census, for a purpose other than as ordered by any state or federal court to remedy an unlawful or unconstitutional district map, the legislature may, before the next decennial census, amend the congressional districts of the districting law adopted under this section by a majority vote of the legislators elected or appointed to each house of the legislature.”
This move comes after a year of fighting between states triggered by President Donald Trump’s demand for Republican state legislatures to redraw their maps to delete Democratic seats and give themselves new ones, as a safeguard against Democrats gaining a majority in the House of Representatives in this year’s midterm elections.
That battle has yielded mixed results for Republicans. They were able to pass new, more heavily gerrymandered maps in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, but Missouri’s map could be put to a vote after good-governance groups gathered signatures for a ballot referendum. Meanwhile, Republicans in Kansas, Indiana, and New Hampshire all pumped the brakes on redistricting schemes, and Ohio Republicans agreed to a compromise map with only minor changes, while Democrats in California retaliated with a five-seat gerrymander of their own and Virginia Democrats are threatening a similar move.
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