The Mississippi House of Representatives did the right thing this week by stapling its Senate-rejected redistricting plan onto the Senate’s own redistricting map. Both chambers must approve each other’s redistricting map to complete the new districts by the June 1 deadline to qualify for House or Senate elections this year. But a Senate committee killed the House plan last week and derailed the process. By attaching its Senate-killed plan to the Senate bill, the House offers the Senate a second chance to keep the process smooth.
Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and Gov. Haley Barbour don’t want convenience, however. They want more Republican-majority districts.
As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Barbour challenged the GOP to take an active hand in state redistricting. He told USA Today last year that GOP victories in statehouses meant Republicans could “make sure that the Democrats don’t take from us tomorrow what we fought so hard for today.”
The death of the House plan in the Senate wasn’t the Republicans last step. Barbour and Bryant worked hard this month to supplant two legitimate House and Senate redistricting maps with new maps favoring Republicans in the next election. But a majority of politicians in both houses rejected the changelings because they see that the Barbour and Bryant maps created fewer black-majority districts. The governor and the lieutenant governor have few reasons to champion the creation of new black districts, of course, since blacks tend to vote Democratic. But the Voting Rights Act of 1965 encourages states to create minority-majority districts and frowns on dissolving proposed new black districts.
Bryant told a twisted history to a group of conservatives last week. He said that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was all about one Democratic president’s push to rig the South in favor of Democrats, instead of it being about reversing some southern states’ penchant for voter suppression. Barbour may be more informed than Bryant on history, but he still advocates for the alternative redistricting maps because they fulfill his GOP promise to make electing Republicans easier. Together they form a major block to the state’s redistricting process.
The problem here is that politicians, by and large, do not like wasting their own money. Plenty of representatives and senators want the U.S. Department of Justice to approve the state’s redistricting by their qualifying deadline, or else they may have to run in a district penciled out by a judge they’ve never heard of.
Barbour holds sway over Republicans in this state, but he’s telling them now to risk spending thousands of dollars each for pointless second campaigns, and that’s a hard pill to swallow. Stop forcing the plans on the people of Mississippi.
