April 28, 2011 07:34 PM UTC

Brophy: GOP Maps "Skewed To The RIght"

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• by: Colorado Pols

A must-read story in the Denver newspaper today from reporter Lynn Bartels on the recently-dissolved Joint Select Committee on Redistricting starts to ask the right questions about maneuverings on the GOP side, which ultimately resulted in the imposition of new, outside-drawn maps on the committee by House Speaker Frank McNulty. As we’ve recounted for you in some detail over the last couple of weeks, McNulty’s actions primarily had the effect of thwarting the efforts of GOP committee co-chair Dave Balmer, sidelining both Balmer and his maps, and throwing the committee into terminal confusion.

Today, Bartels quotes Republican committee member Sen. Greg Brophy claiming that Republicans started drawing a “fair map,” but “got nervous” when they heard about Democratic map proposals and came back with revised, more GOP-friendly boundaries. Brophy says that Republicans got wind that Democrats were “up to something,” and decided to come up with new maps that were very deliberately, Brophy’s words, “skewed to the right.”

Unfortunately, some details we would hope to see in this story are missing, like whether Brophy was talking about Balmer’s maps as the “fair map” they started with, or the first set of McNulty maps, which were replaced in the middle of the process with revised versions that committee members couldn’t adequately explain. We’re reticent to speculate on where these known details fit with Brophy’s new narrative, but we do have a theory on the source of Brophy’s paranoia.

Listen to this clip of Sen. Brophy from April 17th, the Sunday after the three parties exchanged their maps. Interviewing with blogger-turned-radio host Ross Kaminsky:

Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

You said the Democrats released their maps some 48 hours ago. That’s right. It was a little after noon on Friday. But the rest of the story is, there was actually a tell as to what it was they were going to do because Colorado Pols, you know the lefty bloggers who are bought and paid for by SEIU and Tim Gill, they actually gave us a little hint as to what was happening on Thursday or Wednesday of last week when they said, well, the congressional districts haven’t always looked the way they look now. It used to be that all of southern Colorado was one district and all of northern Colorado was one district. So that was a tell. The Democrat machine clearly said their plan to lefty bloggers…

We were forwarded this clip of audio soon after it was recorded, but we didn’t think much of it as it’s just silly. As readers of our blog know, we’ve been talking about redistricting, apparently in ways Republicans really dislike like “thinking big” in general terms, for weeks before any maps were exchanged. What’s more, Republicans started leaking actual proposed maps to the press before the committee exchanged their maps on April 15th. No embargoed information was released by this blog, Republican or Democrat, a minute before it was permitted. Everything posted prior to that moment was publicly available. And to be clear, we had all of them.

The thing we haven’t gotten yet is the check from Tim Gill or George Soros (it gets even better in the comments–Hugo Chavez?). As we’ve said repeatedly, we would take one!

But the bottom line: both Brophy’s excuses to Kaminsky, and to Bartels, are a joke.

So what really happened inside the Republican caucus that convinced McNulty he could neither trust Balmer to draw a map that sufficiently benefited the GOP, nor even stick with the first proposed maps that he himself submitted? Like we said, some of the details of Brophy’s latest story are ambiguous, but we surely did not disclose anything he didn’t already know.

It’s funny, too, because for all the weeping and gnashing of teeth over the Democratic “City Integrity” map proposals, nobody has really denied that they accomplish their stated objective, which is competitive districts. On the other hand, Sen. Greg Brophy is now on record admitting that at least some Republican map proposals are “skewed to the right!”

If the object of the game is to negotiate “from strength,” that was a very bad thing to admit.