Jan 24, 2018 4 min read

“It’s going to be interesting.”

That’s what Washington County Democratic Chairwoman Linda Andrews said in response to the news Monday that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the boundaries on the commonwealth’s 18 congressional districts, and ordered the General Assembly to come up with a new map in just a couple of weeks.

Yes, we’d say “interesting” is putting it mildly.

In the near term, the blockbuster March 13 special election in the 18th Congressional District pitting Republican Rick Saccone against Democrat Conor Lamb will proceed as scheduled, and whoever wins that contest will finish out the remainder of the term of disgraced former U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned in the fall following reports of extramarital shenanigans and staff mistreatment. But from there, who knows? Maybe state lawmakers will pull an acceptable map out of their hats by the Feb. 9 deadline. Maybe the seven justices on the state Supreme Court will come up with one if the General Assembly fails. Perhaps state Republicans, the clear beneficiaries of the current map, will be successful in seeking a stay before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The bottom line is the state Supreme Court has taken the game board and thrown it up in the air just as the competition is getting underway. No matter where you live in Pennsylvania, it’s suddenly become less certain who your congressman is going to be months from now.

There’s another bottom line, though: The decision is good for Pennsylvania, voters and everyone who wants to slow small-d democratic backsliding.

To recap, the state Supreme Court found that the boundaries of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts drawn up by the Republican-majority Legislature eight years ago were “clearly, plainly and palpably” unconstitutional in the way they marginalized Democrats and benefited the GOP. The proof is pretty obvious. Despite having a slight registration edge across the state, Democrats hold only five of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats, while Republicans hold 13. Democrats have mostly been shoehorned into urban areas like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where they run up commanding vote totals with thousands of “wasted” votes. Consider the 2012 general election: In the year Barack Obama was re-elected president, and carried Pennsylvania by five percentage points, Democratic House candidates in Pennsylvania received slightly more votes overall than their Republican counterparts, but the state’s congressional delegation consisted of 13 Republicans and five Democrats.

The map crafted by Republican lawmakers and approved by then-Gov. Tom Corbett, himself a Republican, also led to districts configured in a way that could safely be characterized as odd. To cite one example, the district of U.S. Rep. Patrick Meehan near Philadelphia has been described as “Goofy kicking Donald Duck.”

Pennsylvania Republicans are hardly the first or only politicians to have deployed gerrymandering. Democrats have done it, too, and the practice has only become more sophisticated as computer software can precisely target where voters of certain dispositions live. The practice is being challenged in other states right now, with a Wisconsin case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Following this decision, the best course for Pennsylvania to take would be establishing a bipartisan commission that can draw up congressional borders every decade. No district should distinctly favor one political party over another, and they should have some geographic continuity – no more districts taking on ink-blot shapes, with communities, or even streets, divided.

If gerrymandering goes away and congressional races become more competitive, candidates will likely hew to the middle rather than extremes. That could result in less of the poisonous partisanship we’ve seen on Capitol Hill and, maybe, a little more getting done.

In that case, we would all be winners.