Congressional math

With the Massachusetts delegation set to shrink by one, Beacon Hill will decide how to eliminate one of 10 House seats

massachusetts legislators got the bad news in late December. And by late February or early March, they should have detailed Census figures confirming what they've long expected: The state’s congressional delegation is about to shrink by one, forcing Beacon Hill to choose which of the 10 US House seats to eliminate.

"It’s going to be nothing but painful," says Avi Green, the executive director of MassVOTE, a Boston–based group that plans to watchdog the process. "If it’s a game of musical chairs—if you have 10 candidates who wish to fill nine seats—it will be an extremely bare-knuckled political dance."

The best case scenario, so far as Beacon Hill is concerned, is that one of the 10 Democrats who now represent Massachusetts in the House will step aside—how willingly is anyone’s guess—allowing State House lawmakers to carve up the district and divvy it up among those that remain. Prospects for that greatly improved in November when Republicans gained control of the House. Veteran lawmakers of the party that’s out of power—finding their authority in the House much reduced—often retire in such circumstances.

The smart money had been on John Olver, the 10-term representative from Amherst, to step aside. Population growth in his western Massachusetts 1st District has been slower than in the eastern part of the state and, at 74, he is the delegation’s elder statesman. He also faces a primary challenger in former Pittsfield state senator Andrea F. Nuciforo Jr. But Olver, the only rep on the powerful Appropriations Committee, says he plans to run again.

Another possibility is eliminating the House seat of any representative who runs for the Senate against Scott Brown in 2012. Michael Capuano, who represents a good chunk of Boston plus all of Cambridge, Chelsea, and Somerville, is eyeing a Senate run. US Reps. Ed Markey, Barney Frank, and Stephen Lynch are also reportedly thinking about it. But this approach has its drawbacks. Capuano’s seat, once held by former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, is the only one in the state where a majority of the residents are minorities. Unless it were replaced with another majority-minority district—no easy task given the concentration of minorities in Capuano’s district and the relative paucity of them elsewhere in the state—Massachusetts would almost certainly be sued by Green and a coalition of minority organizations that are monitoring the process for just such a misstep.

The coalition, which includes MassVOTE, the Black Political Task Force, and the Hispanic group ¿Oíste?, will also be pushing Beacon Hill lawmakers to more precisely configure districts with relatively equal numbers of people. A number of minority advocacy organizations sued the state during the last round of redistricting in 2002, after legislators approved lines for State House seats that a court later found had denied minorities fair representation. The 2002 state legislative redistricting not only cast Beacon Hill mapmakers in a bad light, it ultimately led to the indictment and felony conviction of former House Speaker Thomas Finneran on obstruction of justice charges, based on his testimony in the federal voting-rights case.

Avoiding another such fiasco will be a key priority of the joint House-Senate committee that will begin drawing new district lines later this year for Congressional as well as state legislative seats, according to the two Democrats chairing it, state Rep. Michael Moran of Brighton and state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg of Amherst.

If no one in the US House delegation agrees to retire or runs for higher office, things get tricky. State leaders could choose to eliminate one district entirely and divvy it up among surrounding districts, or they could create a "fair fight" district incorporating sections of two surrounding districts. The two current representatives would then have to face off with each other for the remaining seat.

The leading target in this scenario may be Lynch, the South Boston congressman who annoyed his colleagues last year by voting against President Obama’s health care overhaul. To say that politics doesn’t play a role in redistricting, after all, is to deny the obvious.

Consider Finneran’s effort a decade ago to oust then-US Rep. Martin Meehan by creating a new seat surrounding New Bedford and Fall River while eliminating the Lowell–based 5th District, a move widely reported to have been a result of Meehan’s unpopular push for campaign finance reform in Washington. It was considered highly unusual at the time, since Massachusetts had preserved all 10 of its seats following the 2000 Census and had no reason to do much tinkering. Ultimately it failed.

But that’s not to say politics won’t rear its head again. "Some people will suggest that’s not the case. They will say it’s all about the numbers and the population growth," says state Rep. Thomas Petrolati, the Ludlow Democrat who co-chaired Beacon Hill’s redistricting committee after the 2000 Census. "That’s how you sell a redistricting proposal and ensure there’s no legal challenge, but there is a strong element of politics involved." Gerrymandering was born in Mass.It’s advice that Petrolati probably wishes he’d taken himself, since his redistricting proposal was eventually thrown out in court. Petrolati, a behind-the-scenes operator whose involvement in the state Probation Department patronage scandal recently cost him his leadership post as a top deputy to Speaker Robert DeLeo, admitted at the time that he’d paid far more attention to the interests of his fellow representatives in the State House than to Census data.

Pointing to the legal trouble state lawmakers found themselves in last time, Common Cause, a nonprofit group that advocates for reducing political influence over redistricting, has pushed State House leaders to replace the joint redistricting committee with an independent commission to draw district lines. The aim, says Pam Wilmot, executive director of the group’s Massachusetts chapter, is to reduce partisan gerrymandering that has often resulted in oddly shaped districts designed to protect incumbents.

More than a dozen other states have turned to redistricting commissions—some more independent than others—including, most recently, California, where voters in November approved a ballot initiative giving a commission control over the mapping process there. But Beacon Hill pols have resisted the idea of an independent process. That’s no surprise, perhaps, since Massachusetts is where the term gerrymandering was born, in the early 19th century, when Gov. Elbridge Gerry pushed to create a state Senate district with such oddly shaped borders that it reminded people of a salamander.

Moran suggests the idea of lawmakers giving up their role in redistricting would be undemocratic. "The idea that some college professor who has a degree in political science is better at drawing districts than someone elected in a democratic process, I think that’s offensive," he says.

That said, Moran and Rosenberg say they’re looking to avoid, as best they can, the controversy that surrounded the 2002 redistricting by holding as open a process as possible. "It’s a thoughtful step-by-step process to make sure that the committee knows what its job is and the public has the opportunity to express what they are looking for," says Rosenberg. Both of the chairmen say they’ll be holding hearings throughout 2011 to gain input. And both insist that the population numbers will guide their decisions. Still, ensuring Democrats continue to win re-election surely remains a key priority.

This won’t be the first time Massachusetts leaders have faced tough choices during the redistricting process. Indeed, the size of the state’s delegation has dwindled steadily since Congress capped the number of House districts at 435 in 1929. Massachusetts had 15 representatives following the 1930 Census; 14 in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 in the 1960s and 1970s and 11 in the 1980s. The current number, 10, was settled on following the 1990 Census.

At that time, state lawmakers eliminated the 11th District once held by former president John Quincy Adams. Brian Donnelly, who’d held the seat since the late 1970s, retired and his district—which included neighborhoods along Boston’s southern tier, Milton, Weymouth, Randolph, and Brockton—was divvied up between the 9th District now represented by Lynch and the 10th, which William Keating won in November.

Still, Massachusetts has never had fewer than 10 representatives in Washington and the move to nine—the result of faster population growth in the south and southwest United States—is a sobering one. "I’m going in with a healthy attitude," says Moran. "We have been charged with this duty and we have to perform it. The numbers are what they are."