Other emails showed:

A GOP staffer discussing drawing districts to “cram ALL the Dem garbage” into four southeast Michigan districts in order to meet the “obvious objective – putting dems in a dem district and reps in a gop district.”

Another GOP staffer joking about the oddly shaped 9th Congressional District in a corner of Macomb County that jutted up “between Mound and Vandyke (sic) down to 15 mile … perfect. it’s giving the finger” to incumbent Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak.

LaBrant rejected a map that would give Republicans a 10-4 majority in the state congressional delegation, writing in an email on May 26, 2011: “We need for legal and PR purposes a good looking map that did not look like an obvious gerrymander.”

To be sure, Michigan House and Senate Republican staffers also worked on the process. In a deposition for the League of Women Voters lawsuit, a GOP Senate staffer, Terry Marquardt, acknowledged he considered past election results to draw the maps.

“Senators obviously would be interested in knowing whether their districts got better or worse,” Marquardt said, according to a recent court filing in the case.

Congressional Republican staffers also kept tabs on the GOP insiders’ handicraft.

“It is simply clear as we have discussed before that when you start trying too hard in one location that it has a cascading affect (sic) across the state,” Jamie Roe, chief of staff for then-Republican Congresswoman Candice Miller, wrote LaBrant and Timmer in May 2011. “I can’t believe how quickly Jeff gets the changes made.”

The redistricting process largely played out behind closed doors. Despite Democratic demands for more debate, hearings were often perfunctory, records show. One House committee received and approved redistricting legislation after a total of six minutes of discussion.

When it came time to vote in the Senate, the actual bill describing the districts totaled 120 pages of census tracts numbers that were all but indecipherable to those who were not steeped in the particulars of how the maps were designed.

Hune, who handled redistricting for the Senate, told the legislative news site Gongwer that the process was “the epitome of transparency.”

Others reached different conclusions.

“When all was said and done, the lines that were decided upon were not proposed by legislators; rather, (they were) done in a backroom hidden process,” said Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat and minority member of the House redistricting committee in 2011.

Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, said: “We’ve privatized our redistricting process – privatized how we organized governance of our state.”

Richardville, then the Senate majority leader for Republicans, explained that lawmakers relied on consultants because several Senate members had just been elected and redistricting wasn’t a top priority for most.

“We had a very inexperienced Legislature. There weren’t a lot of people who had been through it before,” Richardville said.

Still, he noted that three Senate Democrats also voted for the maps, and a federal court panel approved them.

“It’s hard to say the districts were that bad when so many people voted for them,” he said, adding that he believes Brewer’s federal suit is sour grapes.

“You lose all these seats” he said of complaining Democrats, “and this is a way to say, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’”

3,000 maps. None as gerrymandered

Brewer stepped down after 18 years as Democratic Party chairman in 2013.

Since then, new tests have emerged in an effort to quantify gerrymandering through a term known as the “efficiency gap,” which shows how many votes are “wasted” when districts “pack” one party’s voters into as few as possible, or “crack” them by spreading the minority party into multiple districts where they would remain a minority.

By that measure, Michigan districts have “the most extreme measures of bias” in the nation, along with North Carolina and Pennsylvania, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

One of Brewer’s witnesses in the suit, University of Michigan political science professor Jowei Chen, ran 3,000 computer simulations to randomly draw Michigan 2011 political boundaries.

Every last one was less gerrymandered than the districts Michigan lawmakers adopted in 2011, according to papers Chen submitted in the lawsuit.

Since the case was filed last year, courts have struck down maps in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia as unfairly drawn by GOP majorities, while the U.S. Supreme Court has heard cases (but sidestepped rulings) on the constitutionality of maps that favored Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in Wisconsin.

Michigan is now one of four states, along with Colorado, Missouri and Utah, in which voters will decide this fall whether to convene an independent commission to oversee state redistricting.

The Voters Not Politicians proposal is opposed by political action committees affiliated with the Michigan Chamber, which donated $135,000 by August to Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution, which fought to keep the measure off the ballot.

The Michigan Chamber’s legislative scorecards indicate wide success since the new maps took effect in 2012. The House and Senate have passed 70 chamber-backed bills, most notably the 2013 passage of “right to work” legislation that prohibits union membership as a condition of employment.

By 2014, Republicans had widened their dominance in the Senate to a 27-11 supermajority. A key GOP mapmaker couldn’t help crowing about it.

“Breaking: MI Senate Dems to caucus in former broom closet,” Timmer, the GOP redistricting strategist, tweeted afterward. “#27GOP11Dems.”

Nonetheless, Studley, the chamber president, has said his group wants to influence policy but doesn’t encourage gerrymandering to advance its agenda.

“Would I say that we participated in a gerrymandering effort? No,” Studley told Bridge in July. “Have we been involved in discussions every 10 years about redistricting? Yes.”

But for Johnson, the former House speaker, enough is enough. He is one of a handful of Republicans to come out in favor of the Voters Not Politicians initiative.

“All this fighting. All this money. It’s not good,” Johnson told Bridge. “We need to change.”

Bridge reporters Riley Beggin and Alexandra Schmidt contributed