Editorial: As solemn task of redistricting begins, Harrisburg flashes rare bipartisan signal
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The partisan stew that is Harrisburg has made Pennsylvanians expect everything to be painted in shades of red and blue.
Budget battles that erupt into screaming matches and government ground to a halt. Emergency gubernatorial declarations that result in lengthy back-and-forth court appearances. Even a simple swearing-in of a longtime legislator such as state Sen. Jim Brewster became a political siege.
It is what we have come to expect as politics and affiliations become more and more entrenched and seep deeper into the groundwater of government.
That can leave people unprepared when the unthinkable happens.
What do you do when Democrats and Republicans agree something critically important needs to happen as neutrally as possible?
The decennial redistricting — the redistribution of Pennsylvania’s state and federal legislators based on the 2020 census — is something that has caused issues in the past. The parties have struggled with a tug-of-war of control. Districts that have been gerrymandered into the most ridiculous configurations have sent maps back to the drawing board to be fixed and then to the state Supreme Court to be contested and redrawn in 2018.
So it would seem partisan scrambling would be the default again. But legislators from both sides are pushing for neutrality.
State Sen. David Argall, R-Schuylkill County, would prevent the person chosen to chair the redistricting commission from taking the reins if they or their spouse had been a lobbyist, a political candidate, or an employee of a political campaign or political official over the previous five years.
The commission is selected by the caucus leaders of the General Assembly — the two Democrats and two Republicans who steer the work done by the majority and minority parties. The chairman is the fifth voice. Members of the public are applying for the job. In 50 years, this is only the second time that kind of openness is happening.
“I saw this bill as at least one small step in the right direction trying to make it a little less cutthroat partisan,” Argall said in a recent Spotlight PA article.
Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, has said he is committed to the guidelines in the search. House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre County, has expressed through his office that the chairman should be “a neutral arbiter who shares our commitment to a fair, open and legal redistricting process.”
This is the kind of agreement that is needed — assuming it is genuine and not rhetorical.
The people are not just Democrats and Republicans. People of all affiliations — or no affiliation at all — live in every district in the state. They need to know the landscape has not been carved up to tilt a scale but has been divided as evenly as a child cutting a cake and then letting his brother pick the first piece.