‘This is a screwy district’

The emails provide a rare public glimpse into the horse trading and overtly partisan negotiations of drawing districts.

In Michigan, political parties in control of the Legislature propose district lines that must be approved by the governor every 10 years after the Census. Because of population losses, Michigan’s congressional delegation shrunk from 15 to 14 following the 2010 Census.

The emails were exchanged between GOP aides and consultants in the weeks before the new districts were unveiled in 2011. An early version of the map was drawn to give Republicans a 10-4 advantage in Congress, according to evidence in the lawsuit.

Not a good idea, suggested LaBrant, the Michigan Chamber’s longtime senior vice president of political action and general counsel at the time.

“We needed for legal and PR purposes a good looking map that did not look like an obvious gerrymander,” LaBrant wrote to Timmer on May 26, 2011, according to court documents.

Earlier, Timmer wrestled with how best to draw Camp’s district, which ended up stretching nearly 150 miles from Roscommon County to just outside Lansing, while bypassing Democratic strongholds such as Bay City and Saginaw.

“We have three options now (1) Saginaw Twp and no Frankenmuth, (2) Frankenmuth and no Saginaw Twp, and (3) both Saginaw Twp and Frankenmuth,” Timmer wrote to LaBrant on April 21, 2011.

In the end, half of GOP-leaning Saginaw Township was included in the district, whose border juts out 20 miles to include Frankenmuth, which is “98 percent Republican,” said Paul Purcell, chairman of the Saginaw County Democratic Party.

“This is a screwy district,” Purcell told Bridge this week.

“You knew they were gerrymandering. It doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s just interesting they would put it in an email.”

But even before redistricting, the district was solidly Republican, last electing a Democrat in 1933. In 2016, incumbent U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, a Republican, defeated Democrat Debra Wirth by a nearly 2-1 margin.

Camp, now a senior policy adviser with accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, didn’t respond to messages from Bridge seeking comment.

The Detroit News was the first to report on the existence of the emails, but several others have since been made public by the suit. Most provide little context and involve aides rather than elected officials.

Other emails referenced in the lawsuit show:

An aide to then-Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia, suggested tweaking borders in West Bloomfield in Oakland County and in Wayne County to satisfy “the obvious objective — putting dems in a dem district and reps in a gop district" and "increase the black population in the black districts."

“In a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts. Is there anyone on our side who doesn’t recognize that dynamic?” the same aide, Jack Daly, wrote to Timmer in May 2011. Daly did not return a call Tuesday from Bridge.

An unnamed GOP aide wrote that the proposed 9th Congressional District in southeast Michigan jutted up “between Mound and Vandyke (sic) down to 15 mile … perfect. it’s giving the finger to sandy levin. I love it.”

The emails refer to congressional districts, but the lawsuit by the League of Women Voters also alleges gerrymandering of state House and Senate districts as well as political payback directed toward legislators who objected to the new lines.

The suit alleges new methodologies of quantifying gerrymandering show Michigan has some of the most imbalanced districts in the nation.

“This is gerrymandering in all its ugliness,” said Mark Brewer, attorney for the league.

Brewer, who is also former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, acknowledged that Democrats also have been guilty of gerrymandering nationwide.

“Both parties should stop,” said Brewer, who led the Democrats when the current districts were drawn in 2011. “It’s unfair to voters. It’s grotesque and extreme.”

LaBrant and his attorney, Gary Gordon, did not respond to requests for comment.

This spring, at The Center for Michigan conference, Timmer argued against the Voters Not Politicians ballot measure that would take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and leave those decisions to an independent citizens panel.

Timmer said that such a panel would prove rife with “corruption,” “lobbying, politics and payoffs” and would attract court challenges claiming its members don’t fairly represent Michigan.

“The morass of lawsuits and uncertainty that will arise from this is simply staggering,” he said at the time.

He said those who don’t like the process have “recourse, and it’s called elections,” adding that political districts merely reflect self-segregation, and not partisanship.

“The fact that we tend to segregate ourselves on partisanship or race is a reality,” Timmer said at the time. “It's not necessarily a problem that can be fixed.”

GOP consultant Jamie Roe was also involved in several emails, including the one in which LaBrant guarantees a 9-5 delegation.

“I don’t recall (the emails at all),” Roe told Bridge. “That was seven years ago.”

‘When you have power, you exercise it’

The emails are emerging as the Michigan Chamber finds itself on the defensive over the Voters Not Politicians’ redistricting measure.

It’s the largest funder of the group fighting the ballot measure in court, and the chamber recently was the target of a provocative ad campaign and protests against Deloitte, whose Michigan managing partner, Mark Davidoff, is chairman of the chamber board.

LaBrant has been outspoken for years about drawing districts to help Republicans.

He was hailed as a “genius who first recognized — and fought for — every element of the modern Republican redistricting strategy” in the 2016 book, “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count” by David Daley.

“Perhaps no individual has done more than LaBrant to shape Michigan politics,” Daley wrote of LaBrant’s influence in the state over several decades.

In his own book, “PAC Man: A Memoir,” LaBrant wrote: “When you have power, you exercise it. When you don’t you try to take away the other side’s advantage under the cloak of ‘good government.’”

LaBrant retired from the chamber in 2012. Studley, the chamber’s CEO, told Bridge his group is funding opposition to the Voters Not Politicians measure because it has questions about the measure’s constitutionality.

“Gerrymandering has come to take on a very negative connotation to really be used as a pejorative,” Studley said.

“I think it is not realistic or practical to think that you can take the politics out of what is essentially a political process.”

Chamber leaders told Bridge they did not recall the emails involving LaBrant produced in the lawsuit. The chamber was subpoenaed in the case, and couldn’t find any documents to turn over, said Holcomb, the chamber’s executive vice president.

But Josh Silver, director of Represent.Us, a national elections reform group that bought the ad blasting the chamber, said the chamber’s arguments don’t pass the smell test.

“The fact is, the chamber supports the establishment status quo … which in 2018 is gerrymandering,” Silver said. “Claims to the contrary are simply because they understand that gerrymandering is extremely unpopular.”