They gave GOP redistricting OK

By Associated Press

HARRISBURG — Republicans who used gerrymandering to hold onto a majority in the U.S. House in 2012 despite widespread losses got help from an unlikely source: Pennsylvania Democrats.

A year earlier, state House Democrats helped pass the Republican-drawn map of the Pennsylvania’s congressional districts. And even before that, they had another chance to stop it.

With a divided Republican majority on the Senate State Government Committee, approval of the map was in question until one Democrat, Philadelphia Sen. Christina Tartaglione, voted for it. Her congressman, U.S. Rep. Bob Brady, had supported it, Tartaglione said.

“I guess it was OK for his district,” Tartaglione said.

Many Democrats now say that map is how Republicans came to control 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 U.S. House seats, despite Democrats owning a 4-to-3 registration edge.

The bill, which passed in December 2011, was the second time in 10 years that Republicans got to draw the state’s map of congressional districts to reflect decade-long demographic shifts, thanks to their control of both Pennsylvania’s Legislature and governor’s office.

That eight-seat edge in a state that has voted for the Democrat in six straight presidential elections is also a major contributor to the GOP’s 33-seat majority in the U.S. House, control that shows no signs of changing in this year’s congressional elections.

Nationally, Republicans built an advantage when they drew new boundaries for districts in key states after the 2010 Census.

The Pennsylvania map — designed by Republicans to increase their congressional delegation from 12 to 13 in the 2012 election — was called “the worst gerrymander in modern Pennsylvania history” by Franklin & Marshall College political scientist G. Terry Madonna.

It shifted whole counties and some of the state’s larger cities into new congressional districts, many of which were contorted in an effort to spread the state’s most conservative voters as generously as possible and lump its heavy concentrations of Democrats into as few districts as possible. And Republicans did win a 13th seat, after a hard-fought race in a substantially changed 12th District stretching more than 100 miles from Johnstown to the Ohio border.

The map was so effective that President Barack Obama lost 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts to Mitt Romney in 2012, while beating Romney statewide by more than 300,000 votes.

While Democratic leaders in the state Legislature opposed the GOP’s map, rank-and-file Democrats helped it become law.

Tartaglione later voted with every Democrat in the Senate to oppose the bill, once she learned more about it, she said. Several Republicans voted against it, too, but it still squeaked by, 26-24. In the House, the bill could not have passed without Democrats — 16 of 92 voted “yes” — after eight Republicans voted no and four didn’t vote.