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Dems could have done right thing

By Staff | Feb 21, 2016

Last Thursday in this space, we lamented the fact that the New Hampshire House – by a mostly party-line vote – shot down a bill to create an independent commission to redraw the lines for the state’s House, Senate, Executive Council and congressional districts.

Most of those who opposed the measure were Republicans. We listed those members from our area who voted against creating the commission, though we didn’t note their party affiliation, nor did we check.

District lines have to be redrawn every 10 years, and the problem with allowing the House and Senate to control that process is that it lets representatives to pick their voters, rather than the other way around. Whichever party is in power following a census routinely uses the redistricting requirement as an opportunity to strengthen its hold on the electoral map.

Ray Buckley, the state Democratic Party Chairman, retweeted a link to Thursday’s Telegraph editorial, along with the comment, "Once again @NHGOP House members embarrass themselves and New Hampshire."

Not that Buckley’s party has much room to crow.

If New Hampshire Democrats really cared about drawing up districts that served the public interest rather than their party, they could have created an independent commission or changed the process following the 2006 or 2008 elections, when they controlled the House, Senate and governor’s office. (Buckley became party chairman in 2007.)

In fact, there was a bill that cleared the state Senate in 2007 that would have shifted responsibility for redistricting to the state Ballot Law Commission. It failed after the Democrat-controlled House Committee on Election Law unanimously recommended that it be killed.

Why didn’t Democrats change the system then, when they had the chance? It could be for the same reason Republicans rejected an independent redistricting commission this month: They may have decided to put the interests of their party above the public interest. They might have felt it was more important that their party be allowed to rig the electoral map to give an advantage to one party over the other come election time.

It’s all well and good that Democrats supported the redistricting commission this time around, but it’s always a lot easier for politicians to take the high road when they know there’s no chance of ever reaching their destination. But wWhere were Democrats back when they had a majority?

Interestingly enough, the Valley News up in Lebanon published an interview last week with U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., in which he said gerrymandering has become "as big a problem as the money" in politics. "It really diminished the desire for compromise, because that’s seen as a sellout by some."

The partisan absolutism of people like Buckley and his Republican counterpart, Jennifer Horn, is symptomatic of a cancer that is eating away at our state and national body politic. Horn, at least, deserves credit for having had the courage to call out Donald Trump when she told The Boston Globe last year that "shallow campaigns that depend on bombast and divisive rhetoric do not succeed in New Hampshire, and I don’t expect that they will now."

She was wrong about Trump not succeeding, but not in her characterization of his campaign, which was ironic given the way both parties have evolved into de facto rocket launchers.

As long as voters allow their representatives – Republican or Democrat – to keep hold of the levers that influence election outcomes, the parties will continue to distort the process, ideas will matter less than they should, and divisiveness, bombast and hypocrisy will continue to have a seat at the table.

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