Maryland legislators are meeting in Annapolis this week for what can only be described as a gerrymandering session. According to the U.S. Constitution, Maryland’s eight congressional districts must be redrawn according to the latest census results, and the new districts are supposed to be “contiguous and compact.” The map drawn up by Annapolis Democrats is anything but, especially the dragon-shaped 3rd District — a textbook case of gerrymandering if there ever was one. And the proposed map will move 30 percent of Marylanders into new districts, even though the population increased only 9 percent. “The district drawn by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 that a cartoonist said looked like a salamander is compact and rational compared to the ink blot that is the committee’s 3rd District,” wrote MarylandReporter.com’s Len Lazarick. Even the Maryland Planning District acknowledged that evening out the current districts, the whole point of redistricting, could be accomplished by shifting just 174,000 residents. Instead, the plan approved by the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee, led by Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Prince George’s, and House Speaker Michael Busch, D-Anne Arundel, and slightly tweaked by Gov. Martin O’Malley redistricts 10 times that number.
Those 1.7 million residents, many of them minority voters, are being used as pawns to unseat one Republican: 10-term Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-6th. If the roles were reversed, and Republicans tried to use minority voters to manipulate the congressional map in such a blatantly partisan fashion, lawyers at the Justice Department would already be typing up the lawsuit. But because Democrats are in control, this mapping monstrosity has been largely unopposed — with the notable exception of Rep. Donna Edwards, D-4th — whose predominantly black district is being sacrificed. A handful of Edwards supporters walked out of a closed-door meeting of the Legislative Black Caucus on Saturday, denying the group a quorum to officially endorse the plan.
Edwards correctly called the proposal — which would split vote-rich, minority-majority Montgomery County into three different congressional districts, all represented by white men — “deeply flawed.” That Maryland’s top Democratic officeholders rejected a number of viable alternatives says volumes about where their true loyalties lie. Black Caucus members should join with outraged Republicans to block this mockery of the democratic process. And all Marylanders should be appalled by state Democratic establishment’s willingness to throw them under the bus to further the party’s national ambitions.
