Marc Stier testimony 1/6/2021
My name is Marc Stier. Thank you for taking my testimony. I speak today not only as Director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center but as a professional political scientist who has written and taught about the intersection of philosophical and practical issues in American politics. In January, I wrote a paper for PBPC facetiously titled, “What to expect when you are expecting new districts.” That paper predicted that you would ultimately give birth to maps that Pennsylvanians would embrace. Thanks to the two-step public process in drawing maps, we can look at you’re the maps you are developing in vitro as it were. And they largely but not entirely meet our expectations, as I will explain when talking first about the House map and then the Senate map. The new House district lines are an enormous improvement over those currently in place because they do two things. First, they reflect the changing demographics of our commonwealth; and second, they unwind two decades of extreme partisan gerrymandering. In accomplishing those tasks, the House map rightfully reduces the enormous partisan advantage Republicans have enjoyed for those two decades. Republicans have made two substantive arguments in defense of that advantage. First, they say that statewide partisan fairness is not one of the standards for redistricting explicitly mentioned in the Pennsylvania Constitution. However, our constitution explicitly says in section 2 of Article I that all power is inherent in the people and in section 5 that “elections shall be free and equal and no power...shall…prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rightfully held that a legislative district map that provides a permanent and substantial advantage to one party or another fundamentally violates those principles. Creating districts to ensure that shifts in public opinion are registered in the composition of the General Assembly is thus one of the necessities that allow for some departure from the explicit redistricting standards mentioned in Article 2, section 16. The second complaint about the House district map is that it overrides what is said to be a “natural Republican political advantage” arising from the tendency of Democrats to live clustered together in urban areas. In response, I would not only point to the Pennsylvania Constitution’s requirement of eliminating partisan bias but dispute the notion that the Republican advantage is at all natural. That Democrats live together in urban areas is not mainly a product of individual choice but, rather, of a long history of public policy that has encouraged the flight of disproportionately white, middle-class people from our cities to the suburbs and the concentration of disproportionately Black, poor, and working-class people in large and small cities. Those policies include a transportation infrastructure that encouraged white flight, redlining that undermined the ability of Black people to accumulate wealth; racist deed covenants that for decades made it impossible for Black people to move to the suburbs and zoning laws that make it difficult to build low- and moderate- income housing in the suburbs. Given this history, not only the Pennsylvania Constitution but the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act require that the LRC draw lines that minimizes rather than recognizes any so-called “natural Republican political advantage.” When it comes to the Senate, there is no question that the new lines are preferable to the old ones. But while the overall partisan bias in a Republican direction is reduced in the proposed map, it is unfortunately greater than what’s found in the House map. Even more concerning is that the Senate map does less well than the House map in avoiding splits in communities of interests or municipalities. As others who know these regions better than I do have testified today, the city of Allentown and the Lancaster metropolitan area are both unnecessarily divided into multiple Senate districts. In particular, it would be ideal to create a district in the Lancaster area that could grow into a Latino opportunity district. On the other side of the state, removing Mt. Lebanon from the 37th Senatorial district unnecessarily divides communities that have shared concerns. To conclude on a note that echoes my perhaps strained metaphor—which I chose in part to recognize the difficulty of your work, my ultrasound examination of your maps in vitro suggests that you will give ultimately birth to health maps. Thanks to the benefit of modern technology, however, it is possible to fix some problems before delivery, especially in the Senate map. If you do that most Pennsylvanians will be handing out cigars when your maps ultimately leave the womb.