May 02, 2011 11:55 PM UTC

"Midnight Gerrymander" Veteran Makes Bad Anti-Gerrymandering Spokesman

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• by: Colorado Pols

We were amused to see a guest op-ed in today’s Denver newspaper from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Mark Hillman, getting terribly uptight about the proposed Democratic congressional redistricting map introduced by Sen. Rollie Heath last week. Hillman opens by defining “gerrymandering” for the reader as “irregular manipulating of electoral district boundaries to give an advantage one political party or candidate,” a practice Hillman says is “widely considered distasteful, if not downright corrupt.”

This is a subject that we think Hillman is qualified to talk about, as long as you can get past the eye-popping hypocrisy. It’s very easy to understand why Mark Hillman would leave out of his polemic op-ed the fact that he was Senate Majority Leader* in 2003, when Republicans rammed through a revised redistricting map at the end of the session, unconstitutionally attempting to undo the map already used in one election. Known as the “Midnight Gerrymander,” it’s an incident recalled around the country as a textbook example of redistricting shenanigans.

Bottom line? Hillman doesn’t like Sen. Heath’s map. Hillman is certainly not alone in that opinion, but it’s very difficult to disparage Heath’s tactics, a bill debated in the open and on a regular schedule, compared to Hillman’s 2003 forcing of a map through the legislature by bending every parliamentary rule in the book–just because you don’t like the map that’s already been drawn.

Look, folks, we get that redistricting is a sharp-elbowed political business, and gamesmanship at its most intense. We get that disagreements over proposed maps will break along many lines other than partisan, and what looks like a brilliant plan from one side of the state might look like apostasy to another. It’s very natural to expect both sides to try to pit these competing interests against each other, and to cast the opponent’s proposals in the worst possible light.

What you shouldn’t be able to do is whitewash your own history. Mark Hillman lecturing on how to redistrict without controversy is like Al Capone giving a civics speech.

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*UPDATE: After discussion among readers and some news archive sleuthing, it was established that Sens. Mark Hillman and Norma Anderson were tied in the 2002 GOP election for Senate Majority Leader. We’ve updated to account for the unusual arrangement–Sen. Anderson apparently held the title of Majority Leader for one session, then handed it off to Hillman the next. Contemporary news reports suggest they shared duties, and regardless, both would have been intimately involved with the “Midnight Gerrymander” as Senate leadership.

(H/T: Strong Colorado)