Morning Call Opinion Pennsylvania House GOP launches attack to upend nonpartisan redistricting
April 11, 2018 5pm
By Bill White of the Allentown Morning Call
The story I'm about to tell you speaks volumes about the contempt in which many of our elected state representatives hold all of us. If you don't like it, maybe you'll finally do something about it.
First, thanks to a terrific grassroots educational effort led by the good government group Fair Districts PA, people all over Pennsylvania have been throwing their support behind Senate Bill 22 and House Bill 722, both of which would establish a nonpartisan citizens commission to draw up fair congressional and legislative maps. HB 722 has gained tremendous bipartisan support in the House, with well over half the House members signing on.
The House? It indulged Wednesday morning in the kind of sneak attack on government accountability that ought to send all of us pouring into the voting booths this November to throw the bums out.Metcalfe announced a committee hearing for the next morning, without divulging the topic.
Word spread on social media and elsewhere that he intended to gut the bill — I got some frantic emails Wednesday morning — and a crowd turned out to express its displeasure at the amendment Republican Daryl Metcalfe unveiled for members. Morning Call reporter Steve Esack described it as a "packed, jeering audience." Metcalfe threatened to boot them from the room. "You are here to listen with your ears and not talk with your mouths," he said.
The plan he unveiled is a cynical formula for ensuring that the politicians in the legislative majority have full control of the redistricting process, stripping the governor's veto over the congressional map and removing the Supreme Court's pick on the present mapmaking commission."It makes the current system even more partisan," Samuelson said.
Carol Kuniholm, founder and co-chair of Fair Districts PA, said in a Facebook video afterward, "[Committee members] had not read the bill. They had not discussed the bill. They had not invited the prime sponsors of the original bill to explain their bill or answer questions. "There was no debate. There was no transparency. This was a blatant attempt to bypass the public interest in an independent commission."
http://www.mcall.com/opinion/white/mc-bw-sneak-attack-20180411-story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Let's get the list and circulate it here on DU.
