GOP uses reapportionment to expand power
Election Day takes place Nov. 4.
The incumbent congressman, Bill Shuster, R-Hollidaysburg, running for re-election, will win. In a walk. He faces only nominal opposition.
(Quick, name the Democrat who’s “challenging” him.)
As best as I can make out, and barring a political upheaval on the scale of a Mt. St. Helen’s eruption, Shuster, or his Republican successor, will have a free ride to re-election through 2022, maybe even 2024.
That’s at least eight more years of one-party, non-competitive elections for Congress.
This reason for this is simple, and it has nothing to do with Shuster or the quality of the Democrats thrown his way.
It is this: Shuster’s district, which stretches from the suburbs of Harrisburg to Carmichaels, is overwhelmingly Republican, thus safely Republican for the next five to six elections – 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024.
The tilt toward the GOP is so pronounced that no Democrat – not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself; maybe especially not Franklin Delano Roosevelt – could be elected to Congress from Pennsylvania’s District 9, which includes all of Fayette, Indiana, Bedford, Blair, Fulton and Franklin counties, along with parts of Greene, Washington, Westmoreland, Cambria, Huntingdon and Somerset counties.
These are the facts: following the 2010 election, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution, congressional districts were reconfigured by the individual states- reapportioned is the term – to conform to changes in national and state populations.
Because Republicans had majorities in both the Pennsylvania House and Senate, they were in control of the reapportionment process. Instead of dividing the state’s 18 congressional districts impartially, the Republican majority looked for ways to expand GOP political control of the state’s delegation to Washington.
This they did in splendid fashion with help from several Democrats concerned with immediate, short-term benefits. But of course, looking after the goods is what politicians do.
Politicians are not statesmen, and shouldn’t be expected to act as such.
What is not normal behavior, at least far as the health of our democracy is concerned, is the gutting of competitive elections. Congressional districts drawn to devalue elections betray the very idea of democracy. They throw into sharp relief the idea we have of our country as the world’s oldest and best democracy.
More to the point, when congressmen are not forced to compete for votes from the opposition party, they tend to spin their wheels in the muck and muddle of same-party politics.
Thus, this past spring we had the curious spectacle of Shuster fighting off a challenge on his right flank from two men whose argument boiled down to this: Bill Shuster was not a true conservative, or enough of a conservative.
And this about a congressman whose only real demerit was his support for the Republican Speaker of the House.
All of this makes for some hide-bound politics, the kind that paralyzes problem-solving. I wish we could make the change from “These are the issues in this campaign” to “These are the problems we have to solve in the next two years.”
But as long as a majority of congressional districts are like Shuster’s, I’m afraid we’ll be saddled with the current state of affairs: ideologically-riven politics; a politics that sounds depressingly the same, one election after another; a politics that produces not problem solvers but one-point Neds and Nellies with axes to grind and nothing to fear from the Andys and Anns of the party opposite.
Nothing — not even reducing the influence of Big Money in national and congressional politics — would so shake things up in Washington like changes to the way congressional boundaries are determined.
Of course, we must not be naive about this ever happening in Pennsylvania. First, there is a geographic challenge. Great numbers of Democrats are concentrated on the western and eastern edges of Pennsylvania while the remainder of the state contains tons of Republicans. But there are experts who say this should not pose an insurmountable problem.
As one such expert, Sam Wang of Princeton, has explained, “The structural thing is way overblown. … It is not hard to draw district boundaries more fairly. For one thing, they were more fair before 2010.”
Still, the obstacles are enormous, especially in a state where the reform impulse is historically weak.
Competitive congressional elections would make a world of difference. But there’s no way get there from where we’re at without some major changes.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books about local history: Grand Salute: Stories the World War II.Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.