March 25, 2008 08:51 PM UTC

Happy Happy Joy Joy Redistricting

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• by: Colorado Pols

Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon has never been one to embrace political reality, but now that he is term-limited, he’s become even more obsessed with his own version of political xanadu. As the Rocky Mountain News reports:

State lawmakers would have to try to make congressional districts competitive, rather than a slam-dunk for either party, under the latest attempt to referee what’s usually a very political fight at the Capitol.

Democratic members of the Senate State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee backed the idea Monday, but both Republican members voted against it. Senate Bill 198 now heads to the full Senate for debate.

Lawmakers must redraw district boundaries every 10 years based on the latest census results. The next round of redistricting is due in 2011.

Having an even distribution of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters in a district would take a back seat to meeting all existing criteria such as making sure districts have the same number of people and keeping regions like the Western Slope or eastern plains in the same district.

Lawmakers would have to try to keep cities and counties in the same districts, but counties could be broken up to make a district more competitive.

Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, the bill’s sponsor, said safe districts that always send a member of the same party to Washington help make Congress “dysfunctional.”

He said primaries generally determine who gets elected to Congress in those districts and that those races typically attract people at the extremes of the dominant party in the district.

“When they get to Congress they don’t think the other side is wrong, they think the other side is evil, and therefore they frequently have trouble reaching compromise and making agreements,” said Gordon, D-Denver.

Gordon is right to a degree, but unfortunately we don’t live in a magical fairy land where every seat is competitive and voters are equally aligned between Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliateds throughout the state. It’s not like he’s the first person who has ever thought of this – he’s just the first with enough hubris to act like he was the first to think of it.

The only way you could make a seat like CO-5 competitive, for example, would be to design a completely ridiculous district that looked like a Rorschach test. Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1 in both CO-5 and neighboring CO-6, so where are you going to find enough Democrats to balance that out? You could take some from Pueblo, but then you’ve completely screwed up CO-3. And so on, and so on. There are a lot of Republicans who live in Colorado Springs, and there are a lot of Democrats who live in Denver. That’s the way it is.

The idea of creating seven competitive districts is a lot like TABOR – it sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t actually work.