Redistricting fight in NJ begins

The decennial fight over redistricting in New Jersey begins next week, with the appointment of the Apportionment Commission. If experience is any guide, this will get ugly.

New Jersey has an off-year election schedule, and so legislative district boundaries are due for publication a year earlier than are Congressional district boundaries. For that reason, the State constitution provides for two different redistricting commissions that each run on a different schedule. This year, the Apportionment Commission begins its work, beginning December 1, the day that the Secretary of State must certify all appointments. (New Jersey State Constitution, Article IV Section III). Appointments are due by November 15.

Each State Party chairman appoints five members. (Democratic chairman John Wisniewski has already made his appointments; Republican chairman Jay Webber hasn't said whom he will appoint.) Those ten men have until February 1 (or later, if the Census Bureau is late delivering the detailed population map to the governor) to draw New Jersey's Assembly and Senate districts. If they cannot agree, then the Chief Justice of New Jersey appoints an eleventh member who will break the tie between them.

In the last three decades, Apportionment Commissions have always deadlocked, and the CJ has always appointed a tiebreaker. In 2001, the tiebreaker was Lawrence Bartels, Professor of Political Science, Princeton University. In that year, according to Matt Friedman of the Statehouse Bureau, the Democrats simply persuaded Bartels to vote on their side, and he did. (Bartels recalls that all but one Republican commissioner walked out on the final vote.) With the result that Republicans garnered 52 percent of the total vote in the Assembly races in 2009 but won only 42 percent of the seats.

Governor Chris Christie is determined not to let that happen again. Friedman quotes Republicans as saying that the Democrats made their case to Bartels by saying that they could improve minority participation, in accord with the then-binding US Supreme Court precedent. But in a 2009 decision, the current US Supreme Court overthrew that precedent. As a result, the following State constitutional provision (Article IV, Section II), which sets the standards for the commission's work, becomes binding (emphasis added):

The Assembly districts shall be composed of contiguous territory, as nearly compact and equal in the number of their inhabitants as possible, and in no event shall each such district contain less than eighty per cent nor more than one hundred twenty per cent of one-fortieth of the total number of inhabitants of the State as reported in the last preceding decennial census of the United States. Unless necessary to meet the foregoing requirements, no county or municipality shall be divided among Assembly districts unless it shall contain more than one-fortieth of the total number of inhabitants of the State, and no county or municipality shall be divided among a number of Assembly districts larger than one plus the whole number obtained by dividing the number of inhabitants in the county or municipality by one-fortieth of the total number of inhabitants of the State.

The current map does split towns that contain less than 1/40th of the population. Now, that will be much harder to justify.

Furthermore, Christie's action in firing Justice John E. Wallace has had a number of observers saying that Chief Justice Stuart Rabner will be looking over his shoulder as he decides whom to appoint to the tiebreaker role. Result: the Democrats might not get another Lawrence Bartels. Apart from the Wallace affair, Rabner has already shown himself to be not nearly as liberal as his original appointer, Jon S. Corzine, might have wished. His demeanor during the oral arguments in Cmte. Rec. Robt. Menendez fr. Ofc. of US Sen. v. Wells gave one indicator, as the video record shows. His signing of an order denying a "motion in aid of plaintiff's rights" in the latest iteration of Lewis v. Harris gave another.

Friedman quotes a new Rutgers-Eagleton report saying that the apportionment process is flawed on account of the "back room" dealing involved. This was certainly true of the Congressional Redistricting Commission, whose 12 partisan members colluded and outvoted their tiebreaker. The argument is less valid when the two teams deadlock.

Tom Moran of The Star-Ledger (Newark) glumly admits that the Democrats gained an artificial advantage ten years ago, and predicts that they will lose it. And then,

[W]e’ll soon get to know the real Chris Christie, freed from his shackles.

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