ICYMI: It’s Time For Maryland’s Map To Be Redrawn By A Nonpartisan Redistricting Commission

THERE WAS never any secret about what Maryland Democrats who hold sway in Annapolis were up to when they redrew the state’s congressional district boundaries in 2011. At the time, a few were publicly coy, saying they hoped to make a district more “competitive,” but that was a fig leaf for their real agenda: flipping the 6th District from Republican to Democratic hands.

It worked. By carving Montgomery County into three jagged shards, and redistributing its mother lode of Democratic voters, the mapmakers managed to stack the electoral deck against a Republican incumbent, then-Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, who’d then held the 6thDistrict seat for nearly two decades. The next year, faced with new electoral boundaries and hundreds of thousands of new constituents, Mr. Bartlett lost. Democrats, who had previously held six of the state’s eight seats in the House of Representatives, now held seven.

The Democrats’ excesses were clear from the outset, and any uncertainty was dispelled when former governor Martin O’Malley, who signed the new map into law, admitted last year in a court deposition that his explicit hope and intent was to flip the seat. The fact that Republicans in other states were doing the same thing doesn’t absolve the Democrats; it makes the case for reform more pressing.

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