Vic Williams pulled a Baja Arizona version of a full Ginsburg this week: he got the same op-ed published in three places: the Green Valley News, Northwest Explorer and Sonoran Alliance.
He is trying a new tack: pretending like the last redistricting, back in 2001, was perfectly well ordered, clean and fair. This is a far cry from many on his side who would rather imply that this process is unprecedented and foisted upon an unwilling state, rather than voted on and passed by voters in 1998.
His views of the 2001 process are second hand and a wee bit too rosy. Since he wasn’t in the state at the time, the only concrete thing he can say about that commission is that it was chaired by Steve Lynn. Lynn was ostensibly the independent chair of the committee, but was also had been an ally of Jim Kolbe. I’d like to think that the Democrats weren’t in high dudgeon about this one the way Republicans are about the Colleen Mathis is because we are just better than that, but the fact is, we weren’t organized to go full on crazy over it the way the Republicans are.
(Although, it’s worth pointing out that the ties that Mathis has to Democratic politicians are far more tenuous that Lynn’s ties to Kolbe. Not least because Mathis had also worked for Republicans.)
Still, Lynn didn’t avoid criticism. More than one person noticed that the district 8 that the commission drew seemed to benefit Jim Kolbe: it got rid of Graham County, a place that Kolbe had lost in primaries, even to Joe Sweeney.
Even beyond that, the commission under Lynn’s leadership wasn’t the picture of perfection that Williams paints. I went to just about every meeting in Southern Arizona and I never saw a quorum on the dais until the final meeting. It didn’t bode well for how much that commission valued public comment. At the last meeting, many of us at the meeting asked why there were fewer competitive districts with the new maps, and we were treated to arrogant, dismissive answers.
Williams seems to know little about how the process actually worked last time, but from the one fact he knows we can still see what he and his colleagues think a fair and balanced commission looks like: one led by a nominal independent that carried water for a Republican congressman.
4 Comments
Thank you for the historical perspective, Ted. I wish more people understood this.
We could have had a greater number of competitive districts in 2001 and we can still have them today.
And Lynn’s maps were found to be illegal by the U.S. Dept. of Justice, which Lynn himself admitted on NPR this morning.
From a historical perspective Ken there were plenty of “competitive” districts in the last re districting but conservative ideas prevailed and that is why the GOP has achieved super majority status in the Legislature and majority of US House seats.
Now the dems and (not so ) independent chairman of the AIRC biased new maps from their so called voters rights perspective to further attempt to game the system they cannot control at the ballot box.
The voters of Arizona were fooled by the hollow promise of taking the politics out of re districting through Proposition 106. Democrat political tricks are all over these maps and the only way to re set the process is through reform of the Independent redistricting Commission and that is to spread out the decision making and avoid the concentration of power and potential cronyism from the chairman.
GOP term translation “Democratic Political Tricks”= Only a moderate bias in favor of Republicans rather than an overwhelming bias in favor of Republicans.
I.e. 16 guaranteed state seats for Republicans vs. 10 for Democrats, and 4 guaranteed congressional seats for Republicans vs. 3 for Democrats.
Hmmmmm.