Posts published in January 2012

Every decade, it's the same: As population crowds into urban areas, legislative (and congressional) districts that cover rural areas have to stretch into larger and larger areas. It'll happen again after 2020.

Even so, I've been looking at the Idaho Redistricting Commission's L93 map (yes, that means there have been that many formally submitted) adopted on Friday, my eyes drawn to districts like 7, 8 and 32 - districts large enough that even on the small map on this page, you cam make them out clearly.

District 7 touches U.S. Highway 95 just southeast of Sandpoint, high up in the Panhandle, but not again until near Cottonwood, something like three hours south if you could drive it on 95. But you can't drive it all on any single highway, or any highway. It might be possible to cover it all on forest roads, but even that's debatable. In Oregon they used to call districts like this "helicopter districts," since that's what you'd need to traverse them all the way through without going far afield.

District 32 (a close analogue to the existing District 31) covers Teton County near Jackson, Wyoming, south to the Utah line, and then east past Malad. This too is a "helicopter district," and the subject of many local complaints a decade ago. Its similar creation this time seems not to have generated as many; they may have given up.

But District 8, the one that runs from the Montana border near Salmon south and west pst Emmett nearly to the Oregon border, and which technically is not a helicopter district, is the one that really gets my attention. There is a certain logical common interest; vast amounts of this area are forest or wilderness lands, and much of it economically concerns either natural resources or tourism.

But the breadth of it ... From Lolo Pass on Highway 93 north of Salmon down to Salmon is the better part of an hour. From there to Challis another hour, and close to another from there Stanley in western Custer County. Another hour, or more, from there through Lowman up the extremely twisty mountain roads on Highway 21 up to Idaho City. Crossing over to Highway 55 via Lowman or Idaho City is another half hour or more, and then north up to McCall, or west through Emmett to Letha another hour or so. Pretty drives, but long and sometimes stressful, especially in the winter. (Part of that Highway 21 run is commonly called Avalanche Alley, for good reason.)

Give a slice of sympathy to the legislators who eventually do represent districts like these.

After spending a little time with the Idaho redistricting commission, things look a little more upbeat than earlier this week for the prospects of it completing its task sometime soon - possibly Saturday (they're prepared for a Saturday session), maybe sooner, but likely not a whole lot later.

This was the commission called back to work when the Idaho Supreme Court rejected its submitted 35-district legislative plan for creating too many districts that cross county boundaries. We've opined that the minority view by Justice Jim Jones was closer to the mark - and so today did Commission Co-Chair Ron Beitelspacher - but that's past. Beitelspacher's attitude, and that of the other commissioners, seemed workmanlike: We've been given instructions, now we have to finish the job.

They almost didn't get the chance. You'll recall that Republican state Chair Norm Semanko and House Speaker Lawerence Denney tried to fire and replace two of the three Republican commissioners, for not strongly enough backing Republican interests. The Supreme Court yesterday blocked that attempt. Had it succeeded, the commission almost certainly would have deadlocked.

As it is the probability is that it won't. The commissioners seem to have a good chemistry, and since the success of something like this depends on good will, that's important.

One other point. We made the point a few days ago that it may be too late after another couple of weeks to get the redistricting work done in time to allow for the May primary, forcing a move to August. After a few Statehouse conversations today, we came away with the sense that it's already too late, and that at least some county clerks won't be able to get everything done in time for the May balloting. Expect to hear more about that before long.

In an Idaho Statesman piece, Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter, who's co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign in Idaho, remarks that "I would have bet you a month ago that this would have been over with by the first of February. But things have changed."

He's certainly not alone in that, or in moving to the logical conclusion that Idaho's Republican presidential nominating caucuses, scheduled for March 6, may play a larger role in deciding the nominee than appeared likely, say, just after the New Hampshire primary. Testimony to how things can change.

Let's advance this a step further and ask: If the contest as of March 6 is still competitive between Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which of those two would win at the Idaho caucuses?

Asking the question today (informally) of a number of people, I got one answer (that I happen to agree with): Despite the mass of endorsements of top Idaho Republicans for Romney, and the near absence of an organization or visible support for Gingrich, the answer is - Gingrich. Check out the Idaho Republican base, and what it responds to, and the match seems pretty clear.

There seems to be an ethic in our politics these days that lengthy pieces of legislature are only lengthy to provide loopholes and work for lawyers: if it's worth doing, surely it can be expressed in a sentence or two.

Legislators who've been around the circle a few times come to understand that things rarely are so simple. The world is complex. Sometimes law has to be too, to keep up.

Generally, for example, information about children who are under the protection of the state Health & Welfare services is kept confidential. That's usually a good practice, for obvious reasons.

But not always. Read the statement of purpose to Idaho Senate Bill 1255 (sponsor is Senator Tim Corder, R-Mountain Home), which opens an exception to the rule:

This legislation will allow the Department of Health and Welfare to disclose information about children who are under the jurisdiction of child protective services. Under current law, information vital to the health and well being of children, even medical information, routinely is not shared, and in many cases may not be shared, from one foster parent to another or by other decision makers. Females removed from a home where abuse has occurred from male siblings might well be placed in a home where males reside and the foster parent is never told. This legislation will allow Health and Welfare to better define, in rule, the information that will be disclosed and made available to foster parents, adoptive parents, guardians, and other legally responsible parties.

Another case where a few more words in the law really would be helpful.

The Idaho Legislature, which has before it a bill that would move the state's long-running May primary election to August, might as well go ahead and pass it. Candidates and election officials will need the time, because the odds now are that no new legislative redistricting plan will be adopted in the short term - and that it will be done not by the redistricting commission but by the Idaho Supreme Court.

It didn't seem that way for quite a while. But here we are - or likely soon will be.

This becoming a long and tortured story, let's recap. Redrawing of legislative and congressional districts in Idaho is the job of a six-member (three from each party) redistricting commission, which was appointed last spring and got to work. After many hearings, work sessions and other activities, that group did approve a congressional redistricting (which only barely changed the current districts) but did not quite manage to agree on a legislative plan. It came close; most of the issues were resolved. But just a few were not, and the commission's deadline passed without a plan formally approved. (Informally, they approved one a couple of weeks later, but it had no official effect.)

So a second commission, made up of new members, was appointed to replace the first, with the first meeting held in September and the deadline clock reset to December 13. As with the first, the commission members were appointed by the state Republican and Democratic state party chairs and highest ranking officers in the state Senate and House. Much of the research and public hearing work already done, this half-dozen got directly to the maps and made a bipartisan agreement on a legislative map, and then adjourned.

That might have been the end of it. But monkey wrenches appeared. The plan became the subject of lawsuits (two, one from North Idaho and one based around Twin Falls County), and last week the Idaho Supreme Court decided the Twin Falls argument had enough merit to throw out the commission's map and order the commission back to work to draw a new one.

New problems arose from this. One, not much mentioned but possibly significant, is that the state law should seem to indicate that the last redistricting commission became defunct as of December 13. (The Supreme Court did not address that question about whether a current commission even exists.)

Assuming, however, that it still does, a meeting has been called for it this Thursday at the Statehouse, to include its existing six members. But here too there's a problem. Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney and Idaho GOP Chairman Norm Semanko said last week that they want to replace two of the Republican members of the commission (Dolores Crow and Randy Hansen, both conservative Republican former legislators) evidently on grounds that they were insufficiently protective of Republican Party interests.

The Idaho Attorney General's office then issues an informal report saying that Denney and Semanko lacked legal authority to fire Crow and Hansen and replace them. Today, Denney and Semanko released a private informal legal opinion arguing that they do have such authority. This too looks to be destined to be a Supreme Court case.

That brings us up to date, so let's game this out.

The odds seem to favor new commission members. Whether Denney and Semanko will prevail on their view of the law is unclear, but there's a fair chance that either they will, or that the current commission will be held to have been disbanded by the December 13 deadline, and so six new members have to be appointed anyway. If they are, the odds are that they will not be in a compromising frame of mind, which will make producing any plan (which needs votes from both parties to pass) more difficult. Even if it wasn't dealing with new Supreme Court mandates. This whole cluster of issues is unlikely to be settled within the next few weeks.

It may not be settled at all, in terms of a commission-produced plan. If it does not deliver a plan, the job will go to the Idaho Supreme Court, which will.

This is in all not a super-speedy process. It will take a couple of months at best, and maybe more.

Probably the commission, whatever its composition, would be best off to throw up its hands and say: "Justices, it's all yours."

And get the candidate filing and primary election schedule moved back a few months accordingly.