Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

Democrats in Maryland have a pretty solid built-in advantage: Most of the state leans liberal, which means that given their druthers, voters would typically hand a little more control to Democrats than to Republicans.

But after the 2000 census, the Democratic Party decided it need even more power. So Democrats drew a congressional map that made the 4-4 split among congressional seats more likely to be 7-1 — and they did it by carving the state into jagged, twisting, turning districts that only make sense through partisan lenses.

At the time, I was deputy editorial page editor at the Baltimore Sun, and we went nuts about the rapacity of the political greed on display, and especially about the obvious contortions Democrats were indulging to maximize their power.

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It didn’t matter. The maps got drawn, and the consequences unfolded.

Here in Michigan, I watched the Republican Party do the same thing in 2010. Our current congressional map is a joke by any standard, but the most partisan, and the most favorable to incumbents.

In both cases, the problem was the same: Political line-drawing, a rule-making function of our democracy, was reduced to an exercise in self-dealing. Politicians decide for themselves and their compatriots how the people will be represented, instead of the people deciding how they want to be represented.

Republicans do it when they have the chance, as they do here in Michigan. Democrats do it just as enthusiastically. It’s ultimately about power, and the tightly held control of it — regardless of party.

This, of course, is nothing new. So-called political gerrymandering dates to the 19th Century, and it mostly goes unchallenged.

But should we do better? Can we?

We’ve argued on this editorial page for some time that yes is the answer to those questions. The issue hasn’t gone anywhere because the same politicians who control the maps also control much of the process of reform. We’d need a statewide ballot initiative — costly, arduous — to recast the redistricting picture.

Now, there may be new impetus for that citizen-led effort, thanks to a court ruling in Wisconsin that may have established a new baseline for arguments that partisan gerrymandering can go too far and violate the U.S. Constitution.

For decades, the courts have avoided setting clear standards for constitutional limits on partisan line-drawing — so much so that most experts I know believed the question was effectively dead. The constitutional limits on district line-drawing track mostly along the lines of racial discrimination, ensuring that the Voting Rights Act is not violated.

But a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin not only found a way to craft limits, but did so in hard-to-argue numerical terms. The case could go quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Anthony Kennedy could be the deciding vote. He has long entertained the idea that there could be constitutional limits to partisan gerrymandering, but hasn’t settled on a standard by which to judge it.

Meanwhile, here in Michigan, Democrats plan to file a lawsuit similar to the one that spurred the Wisconsin ruling, saying our goofy map — which, by the way, includes a district that swings from the Detroit riverfront to the Grosse Pointes and up to Pontiac — is similarly unconstitutional. And Democrats in the state House last week introduced legislation again for a constitutional amendment to implement a nonpartisan commission to draw districts. That likely will go nowhere in the Legislature.

This is all tricky stuff, and there’s by no means an obvious, straight line for divining how these cases get sorted out.

One of the biggest problems is that partisan gerrymandering is often difficult to distinguish from racial gerrymandering, because so much of the country’s racial polarization is baked into the divisions between parties. This is why Republicans in North Carolina, for instance, have been arguing that their rather overt efforts to minimize black electoral power is about party, and not race. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference — at least in motivation, if not outcome.

It’s also tough in states like Michigan, where so much of the African-American population is concentrated in Detroit and some inner-ring suburbs. It gives Republicans an easy way to cabin both black and Democratic political power, and it also gives them a cynical crutch to lean on when they get called out for doing so. The Voting Rights Act requirements about not “packing” black voters into single districts but also not splitting them to dilute power becomes the reason, in GOP parlance, for the map-drawing shenanigans.

The gamesmanship was laid pretty bare during the most recent redistricting, when a nonprofit group ran a contest for citizens to draw their own maps, and a group of college students came up with one that made more geographical and political sense than the Legislature’s efforts.

But in truth, much of the debate over who’s doing what to whom, or why, could be cleared by making the whole process more standard-driven, more transparent and more in the control of the people themselves, rather than the politicians.

Instead of having politicians draw the maps every 10 years, why not entrust that duty to a panel of citizens and experts? The knock on this idea typically is that it would be impossible to craft a nonpartisan effort. But it could be bipartisan, split fairly among believers on either side of the spectrum. Seems to me any attempt at fairness gets us further than the current system, which allows the party in control in the decennial year to do what it wants.

We could also decide by which criteria congressional and legislative districts should be drawn.

It’s only partisan now because partisans get to do it. We could inculcate into law requirements that districts meet other qualifications — about their shape or geographic size, about the extent to which they keep communities together or split them up.

And we could require that the entire process take place in public, rather than in political caucus rooms in the Capitol.

The idea should be to make sure every person, and every community, and every person has a fair chance to elect someone who’ll represent their interests in Lansing and Washington. It shouldn’t be to snatch or maintain political power for parties, or politicians.

We can wait for the courts to sort this out for us, and hope that it produces something better than what we have.

Or, we can do it for ourselves. And we can put in more than the legal minimum protections for interests across the political spectrum, and around the state.

The choice seems like a no-brainer to me.