April 30, 2010

The defeat this week of both a bi-partisan reform plan, and a strictly partisan amendment that many felt would have made things worse rather than better, virtually guaranteed that the General Assembly will not address gerrymandering reform before the next 10-year plan must be adopted.

On Thursday, Republican House members stood with a broad coalition of government reform groups, as well as most editorial writers in the state, in opposition to SJRCA 121. They were joined by one Democrat member of the House in defeating the proposal.

The measure, which had been previously pushed out of the Senate on a straight partisan roll call, retained the fatal flaw of allowing politicians to draw their own districts and pick their own voters.

During a lengthy debate, House Republicans repeatedly hit at the inherent conflict of interest contained in the proposal. Over the past year, redistricting reform has been the subject of a number of hearings across the state by a Senate panel. At those hearings, a consistent demand of witnesses, experts and reform groups, was that the process of drawing legislative districts should be handed over to a non-partisan, independent body—a critical provision that was not included in SJRCA 121.

Republican lawmakers had embraced the non-partisan recommendation and supported a plan drafted by the League of Women Voters of Illinois and supported by a broad coalition of reform organizations. Members of Governor Quinn’s Illinois Reform Commission were onboard with the League’s proposal.

Unfortunately, later on Thursday, the proponents of an independent petition drive in support of the bi-partisan redistricting plan acknowledged they would be unable to reach the state’s extremely high demands for getting their proposal on the ballot.
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As a result, it seems unlikely that redistricting reform will be advanced by the General Assembly, or through other means, in 2010.