Somehow I still get my hopes up, y’know? But it just feels like it happens every single time.
Here’s the state-legislature redistricting news for Wisconsin, in a decision that dropped just last night:
Wisconsin Supreme Court chooses maps drawn by Republicans in new redistricting decision
WPR summarized the upshot like this:
An analysis of the competing redistricting plans by Marquette University's John Johnson found that in a statewide tie, Republicans would be expected to win 63 out of 99 Assembly seats and 23 out of 33 Senate seats under the new GOP map.
That’s the playing field upon which Wisconsin will be electing state legislators this year. If 50% of the vote is Democratic, the Republicans would be expected to win a veto-proof state-legislative majority.
How did we get here?
Well, the first go-around in this debacle was the redistricting based on the 2010 Census. Scott Walker became governor and the GOP won majorities in both houses of the state legislature, teeing up an incredibly secretive re-districting process.
They forced every rank-and-file Republican lawmaker to sign confidentiality agreements, which some people have called "secrecy oaths."
One by one, each GOP senator and representative visited this law firm to look at their district, and their district only. Under the terms of the confidentiality agreements, they had to keep it private.
…
On July 11, 2011, the redistricting bill that Republican mapmakers had been working on behind closed doors for months was introduced.
Notably, this was the first time Democratic lawmakers got to look at the map at all. Even though that private law firm had been working for the Legislature, Democrats were not allowed to see their own districts, or anyone else's.
Two days later, the Legislature held the first and only public hearing for the redistricting bill.
Wisconsin was exhausted from protesting Walker’s previous attacks on the state, and from the (ultimately unsuccessful) recall efforts. This map-making travesty slipped into law without anything like the Act 10 protests that made international news… and the effects were exactly as the GOP had designed.
A decade later, at least we have Democratic governor Tony Evers. The heavily-Republican majority state legislature passed redistricting maps that made the gerrymander even a little worse, and they created a brand-new standard for this particular redistricting that exists nowhere in Wisconsin law: they claimed that this time around, the most important guiding feature was that the maps should be as similar as possible to the last time around. (Of course, this was sheerest hypocrisy, because that standard was nowhere to be seen in the secretive maps that had locked in their majority for a decade.)
A least having a Democratic governor meant a veto! And it created the opportunity for Gov. Evers to produce a competing set of maps.
Unfortunately, we also have an elected state supreme court, with a conservative majority as well. The court agreed with the GOP that suddenly the most important principle was that the maps change as little as possible, which left the Dems little room for maneuvering. Within that little room though, the Governor’s maps ended up not only being “better” than the GOP maps according to their newly-invented principle, but also creating an additional majority-minority district (Dem maps would have 7) where the GOP maps took one away (GOP maps would have 5).
In a heartening turn of events, last month the swing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court — Brian Hagedorn, conservative but at least with some hesitance about hypocrisy — agreed that the Governor’s maps best met the stated priorities, which meant that those were the maps to abide by for the 2022 elections.
But wait! The GOP, which had previously argued that the Wisconsin Supreme Court was the best place for a final ruling, suddenly switched course and declared that this must go to the US Supreme Court instead.
And the US Supreme Court took it up on the shadow docket and said that the Dems hadn’t made a persuasive enough argument that the new majority-minority district was needed under the Voting Rights Act, and sent it back to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
And yesterday — the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed with the US Supremes, with Hagedorn switching sides, saying that the SCOTUS ruling left him no choice.
At least SCOTUS left the Congressional maps alone, so that’s good news at the federal level.
On the state level, however, we are so screwed.
We’re going to have to create a blue wave in order to prevent a veto-proof Republican majority in the Wisconsin State Legislature.
By the way, this comes at a time when full reproductive health care is on the chopping block. Wisconsin is one of the states where, if Roe is overturned, abortion becomes instantly illegal under old statutes that were never attended to. One of the many areas in which a veto-proof GOP majority — or a GOP governor — would be an absolute wrecking ball.
So damn draining, and it comes even harder having gotten my hopes up with the Governor’s maps, which weren’t allowed to be fair but were sure better than nothing.
Here we are, however, with Charlie Brown lying on his back once more, dazed and missing his socks and shoes.