March 10, 2011 12:04 AM UTC

Would McNulty Spike His Own "Kumbaya Committee?"

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve held off from discussing a late bill introduced last week affecting the congressional redistricting process currently underway–to be perfectly honest, the potential import of House Bill 1276 is such that we wanted to be sure it is what it seems to be.

And if what we’re hearing about HB-1276 is right, this late bill could spell the end of any semblance of “bipartisanship” in the redistricting process: depending on who is really behind it, and why. As the Durango Herald reported over the weekend:

Ignacio Rep. J. Paul Brown introduced Colorado House Bill 1276, which would restore a Republican bill passed after 2003’s “midnight gerrymandering.”

The bill tells judges to draw the districts by keeping together similar counties without considering whether local voters prefer Democrats or Republicans.

Democrats repealed that bill at the end of the session last year, when they still held power in the House and Senate. They argued that judges should be able to draw districts that are competitive for both parties…

Veteran lawmakers still remember the 2003 redistricting fight as the scene of the decade’s most feverish partisan acrimony. Majority Republicans pushed through a bill in the last three days of the 2003 session that could have given them a 6-1 majority in the state’s congressional delegation. Democrats won a lawsuit to overturn the map.

Later, Republicans passed a bill to tell judges how to draw future maps. Democrats repealed that bill last year, and Roberts and Brown want it restored.

Here are the facts as we understand them: House Bill 1276 would restore a GOP-instituted law from the aftermath of the infamous 2003 “Midnight Gerrymander” attempt to ram through a GOP-friendly congressional district map.  Repealed last year by Democrats, the law directs the courts to sort out redistricting by keeping counties intact–even if that means creating districts that aren’t competitive. Although represented as a rural protection measure, the biggest problem are its potential effects in the Denver metro area. The concern that contiguous blocs of voters in the metro area might be diluted (or shoehorned, as the case may be) into new districts built around county lines was a principal reason this 2004 law was repealed.

Republicans, on the other hand, are just as aware of the advantage this rule would give them as Democrats are. It’s one of a number of issues leaders publicly hoped they would be able to work out in the bipartisan redistricting committee presently holding meetings around the state.

Except now there’s a problem: if Republicans were truly taking part in the redistricting “Kumbaya committee” in good faith, why was this bill introduced? As a late bill, House Speaker Frank McNulty’s signoff was required. But McNulty is also the one taking credit for the bipartisan committee–whose work would be undermined directly by HB-1276. Why would McNulty allow a late bill with such danger of throwing his own redistricting effort into chaos?

Unless McNulty comes clean, the possibility that Republicans were never bargaining in good faith–and the bipartisan “Kumbaya committee” is a giant snow job–must now be considered.