Proposed Bucks County House Districts
My comments are informed by a number of life experiences. Bucks County has been my home for my entire almost 75 years. I served seven years in our District Attorneys Office during which I became very familiar with every one of the diverse municipalities which make up Bucks County. Later, for several terms I represented the 143rd Legislative District and thereafter the 10th Senatorial District in the Pennsylvania Legislature. Subsequently I was elected and served as a Judge of the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas for 11 years. Most recently I was elected Bucks County District Attorney, a job from which I retired in 2016. The badly misguided plan proposed for Bucks County's House seats does substantial and totally unnecessary violence to our existing legislative districts, presumably to achieve overarching statewide objectives. As others have pointed out, the effect of the proposed plan would be to render several presently competitive districts unbalanced in registration, enhancing the distressing polarization we have seen in our national and state politics in recent years by empowering the most extreme voters in each party. Bucks County has had a proud history of electing moderate, independent legislators of both parties. The proposed map will undermine those tendencies. During my years as a legislator I looked up to the Representative, later distinguished Federal Circuit Judge Anthony Scirica. One of his thoughtful observations about government was that "There is no constituency for the process." Through the years it has been my experience that proper debate and deliberation, or in this case a focus upon drawing cohesive legislative districts which empower the residents thereof, are too often subverted in the name of achieving what someone in power has decided is today's greater good or noble objective. More often than not, the result is harm which could have been avoided if robust and orderly debate had compelled careful consideration of the reasons for taking a particular momentarily popular action and the foreseeable consequences which would flow from it. This proposed map and the objectives behind it strike me as just this kind of mischief! Whatever past gerrymandering has gone on in our Commonwealth and however much the Commission may wish to achieve a partisan balance of seats in future legislatures, this "greater good" should not be achieved by radically redrawing existing seats which do a good job of keeping municipalities and to the greatest degree possible school districts together in cohesive Bucks County legislative districts. The independence of Bucks County legislators from any interest other than those of the communities that elect them should not be undercut in the name of some academic vision for the Commonwealth as a whole. Past decades have seen explosive growth in our county which required more dramatic changes to our districts. More recently growth has slowed and it is possible to make minor changes in our existing districts so as to accommodate actual population and if anything reduce the splitting of political subdivisions between house districts. Because a Bucks County map that complies with constitutional standards, keeps communities largely in their present alignment and discourages increasing partisanship between our representatives is possible, the present unnecessarily disruptive redistricting proposal should be rejected.