Charles Ellison
+ FollowREDISTRICT365: Redraw Worries Won’t Blow Over in Chi-town
Media takes and angles on just how critical redistricting is these days – at issue, right now, is that a lot of pollsters still can’t come to any consensus on the impact in 2012. What’s obvious is that there is a lot of movement taking place: Black flight is moving quite a few Black folks out of the cities and into the suburb or in a reverse migration down South. Will be interesting to see just how concentrated Republican political power can get with so many people of color moving back into their red states and strongholds.
Chicago is undergoing some major shifts, and the redistricting battles are getting hotter. While it’s still the center of all things ugly politics, it’s losing population a little too fast.
Cheryl Corley at NPR catches three competing racial attitudes in less than six paragraphs …
Chicago Alderman Howard Brookins, head of the Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus, says redistricting may not be at the forefront of the public’s conscience, but it is extremely important.
“It means resources. It means voting power,” Brookins says. That power, Brookins says, has allowed black Chicagoans to help elect several firsts — a black mayor of Chicago in the 1980s, two African-American U.S. senators and even a president.
“And so, with that extra oomph, we have been able to get people in higher offices,” he says.
At a recent public hearing of the City Council’s Latino Caucus, residents came to have their say about a new ward map for Chicago. Chicagoan Juan Calderon says his relatives live in several Latino neighborhoods.
“I definitely think due to the increase among the numbers of Latinos, it’s important for us to have equitable representation across the board in the city of Chicago,” Calderon said.
Calderon said it would mean more attention paid to issues important to Latinos. In the Logan Square neighborhood where the hearing was held, there’s a diverse population — Latinos, African-Americans and Eastern Europeans. And while the spotlight is on African-Americans and Latinos, neighborhood resident Alexander Denell said race shouldn’t matter.
“On the other hand, I am with Americans of Polish descent, and I do want to stand up and say we Polish-Americans do count,” Denell said.
Jack Bouboushian in Court House News talks about law suits …
Opponents of Illinois’s Redistricting Act, including 10 Republican members of Congress, cannot subpoena recommendations state lawmakers considered when drawing the 2011 map in accordance with the 2010 Census results, a panel of federal judges ruled.
The U.S. Constitution requires state lawmakers to redraw congressional district boundaries after each decennial census. In June 2011, Illinois passed the Illinois Congressional Redistricting Act of 2011, eliminating one congressional seat and establishing boundaries for the remaining 18 congressional districts.
Shortly thereafter, the Committee for a Fair and Balanced Map, along with 10 Republican congresspersons and six registered voters, sued the Illinois Board of Elections and its individual board members. The plaintiffs alleged that the law violates the 14th and 15th Amendments by discriminating against Latino and Republican voters.
As part of an expedited discovery schedule, the plaintiffs served 30 subpoenas on various third-party government committees and employees, requesting documents concerning the planning and negotiation of the 2011 redistricting map.
When the third parties refused to comply with the discovery requests, claiming that they are protected from disclosure by legislative immunity, the plaintiffs moved to compel the enforcement of the subpoenas. The president of the Illinois Senate, the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, and the chairpersons of the Illinois House and Senate Redistricting Committees moved to quash.
Last week, a three-judge panel convened by the Northern District of Illinois partly granted the plaintiffs’ motion to compel, but found that communications between lawmakers and their staff must remain confidential.
And Rick Peason in The Chicago Tribune describes continued worries amongst Democrats over that ruling …
Democrats, who control the Illinois legislature and governor’s office, approved new boundary lines for the state’s congressional districts in the once-every-decade procedure known as reapportionment. Ostensibly a process to try to equalize population in each district based on federal census results, redistricting also is a power game played by the political party that controls the mapmaking.
The political leanings of voters under the new map lines could reverse the partisan makeup of the state’s delegation, which turned 11-8 Republican during last year’s mid-term elections. Illinois will lose one U.S. House seat because its population did not increase as fast as other states and Democrats benefiting from the new map could pick up several seats now held by the GOP.
A group that includes all but one of the state’s current Republican congressmen challenged the Democratic map in July, contending it failed to adequately represent a growing Latino population and that it wrongly gerrymandered districts to dilute Republican representation. Democrats have argued that the map was fair and competitive.
Last month, Republicans asked the federal court panel to order Democrats to comply with several subpoenas about how the map was put together. In a ruling issued earlier this week, the three-judge panel said lawmakers and their staff had immunity from providing documents to Republicans that were not based on objective facts used to draw the new map.
Republicans have maintained that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee played the pre-eminent role in drawing up new congressional districts for Illinois.
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