The Independent View: Virgina's Redistricting Will Go to U.S. Court

A public hearing on redistricting ended abruptly Monday when the Virgina House Privileges and Elections Committee chairman, Mark L. Cole, R-Spotsylvania, refused to take further testimony after announcing that the Senate had adjourned the special legislative session hours after it began.

Cole interrupted Diana Egozcue, president of Virginia NOW and the sixth of 19 scheduled speakers, with the announcement, “We’re no longer in session, so we can no longer take your testimony.”

House Republican leaders appeared shell-shocked by the Senate maneuver, which ensures the General Assembly will not meet a Sept. 1 deadline imposed by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to fix unconstitutional defects in the redistricting plan that then Gov. Bob McDonnell signed in January 2012.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued a statement that explicitly kicked the issue back to the courts and declared, “The opportunity for a legislative remedy has ended.”

McAuliffe said he was going to send a letter to the courts. “They need to get this redistricting done,” he said in a meeting with reporters outside the Executive Mansion.

So, the court will assume the task of drawing new districts to reduce what it found to be unconstitutional gerrymandering to pack black voters into the 3rd Congressional District and reduce their influence in other districts.

“I’m still speechless,” said Del. S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, chairman of the Joint Apportionment Committee and the lead architect of House Republicans’ pending plan to remedy problems the court found in the 3rd District.

Jones had planned to file his proposal next week for the General Assembly to consider near the end of the month. “I wanted to hear comments today about the 3rd and what their remedies are,” he said.

Cole called the Senate maneuver “irresponsible,” and House Republican leaders called it unconstitutional in a joint statement issued Monday afternoon.

“The House of Delegates remains in session. ... Unfortunately, without the presence of the Senate, there is no possible path forward on redistricting,” said a statement by House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, and other House GOP leaders.

Advocates for nonpartisan, independent redistricting said the dramatic breakdown proves their point.

“This is emblematic of what’s wrong with the system,” said Dale Eisman, senior researcher at Common Cause. “They run the process as a closed shop,” Eisman said.

Anna Scholl, executive director of ProgressVA, called it “particularly egregious that they called off the hearing and sent everyone home.” “It doesn’t say much for the process or public input to pull the plug,” Scholl said. “They are treating this as a political game of one-upping each other and not as a transparent process that respects the voters.”

But there was little chance of the General Assembly producing a redistricting plan to satisfy the court that McAuliffe would not veto, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “It was pretty pointless anyway,” Sabato said Monday. “This was going to end up in the hands of the 4th Circuit. Everybody knew they were going to draw the lines anyway. Nothing was going to change.”

McAuliffe made clear last week he wanted a solution that redrew the state map for all 11 congressional districts, currently divided between eight Republican and three Democratic representatives.

After the Senate adjourned Monday, the governor called for “a comprehensive approach that starts from the beginning and erases the taint of racial and partisan politics that poisons the old congressional map.”

But House Republicans began the special session by using McAuliffe’s own words against him to argue against a comprehensive rewriting of the districts.

The Joint Reapportionment Committee of the General Assembly adopted criteria that largely was the same as in 2012 to guide the redistricting process. Jones cited the governor’s warning in vetoing legislation this year of a “terrible precedent” in making major changes to election districts outside of the decennial census.

“Allowing the legislature to make substantive changes to electoral districts more frequently than once a decade injects further partisanship into a process I regard as already too partisan,” the governor said in vetoing a bill to make changes to election districts in Smyth and Fairfax counties.

The Republican plan was to make the least number of changes necessary to make the 3rd District comply with the court’s order to find a solution that did not pack minority voters into one district to dilute their influence in others.