As the mud-wrestling slaps on in court and on the streets, the question lingers over that new map for Kansas congressional districts: Is it legitimate or a sham? The battle moves from Wyandotte County District Court to the state Supreme Court, leaving in its wake a trail of frayed census data, hurt feelings, bewilderment and outrage.
At issue are the new boundaries for four U.S. House districts, drawn and approved last January with lightning speed (seven days) by the Republican-dominant legislature. Each district holds – amazingly – equal populations of 734,470, give or take a few.
There is much angst in the northeast, where the map is seen as a snide slap at a region well-stocked with political moderates and liberals. The map splits Wyandotte County and Kansas City, a 3rd District Democratic stronghold, sending the north half into the more rural and Republican 2nd District. Opponents say this dilutes the Kansas City vote and muffles the influence of people of color.
In the west, the map is at most a surprise: Far-away Lawrence was scooped from northern Douglas County and the old 2nd District and tucked into the northeast corner of the new 1st District. This liberal university city (pop. 95,000) becomes a blue knob on a red district that covers 59 counties nearly 400 miles west to the Colorado border. In real life, Lawrence is part of the five-county metropolitan northeast (pop. 1.16 million).
Curtis Woods, an attorney for Lawrence protesters, told the court that a simple eye test of this map reveals the Republicans’ crude stretch for power. Shoving Lawrence into the 1st District would deride its urban culture, muffle its center-left voice, he said.
District Judge Bill Klapper hinted strongly that the map is likely the work of political and racial gerrymandering. But the legal issue at hand, he said, is whether the map violates the state constitution.
*
An un-legal question is whether the map offends the unity of certain regions, their frame of mind and place. Last August, a legislative committee blitzed Kansas in a cryptic rush of show hearings on reapportionment. One after another, rural and urban residents alike attacked a simmering rumor that part of the metro northeast might be merged with farm country. They had few mutual interests and their chief worries often differed, they said.
To be sure, they shared general concerns – schools, infrastructure, even the weather – but for different reasons. Within those concerns lay the difference between improving communities in urban regions, and holding onto them in the rural sector.
Legislators should know the distinctions, address them in separate ways, and shape a course of shared purpose over the long haul. This has happened in the past, with public health and social welfare initiatives, with reform of the courts and statewide school finance, with economic development, and with massive bridge and highway programs, to name a few.
On the Republicans’ new map, the First district is expanded east to take in Jackson, Jefferson and that northern nip – Lawrence – of Douglas County. (The rest of Douglas remains in the Second District.) To offset adding a city of 95,000 in the new 1st District, six rural counties were sent back to the 2nd District: Geary, Wabaunsee, Morris, Marion, Chase and Lyon. They are solidly Republican with a combined population of 95,500 . The math seems to work. The empathy doesn’t.
*
On the surface, Lawrence has only the frailest connection to Hays, another university town. When he was a state senator from there, Jerry Moran called Ft. Hays State “the University of Western Kansas.” The two regions share an odd kind of symbiosis. Great wind farms stretch westward from mid-Kansas, making gobs of electric power to stimulate dreams of green living in the east. The central-west oil fields, the western farms and feed lots tell a contrast: producing food and fuel and preserving the land; protecting our air and water while getting from here to there; helping communities to ascend and to offer promise, each in one way or another.
But in Topeka, reapportionment is not about converging interests or mutual purpose. It now means only the allotment of political power and a tighter grip for the party in charge. The mission is not to find mutual interests among separate cultures, or to improve the lives of Kansans east and west. It is only to dilute the moderate and liberal vote by splicing it into conservative majority districts – protect one kind, weaken the others. It only reveals a great difference between leading, and ruling.
