The 2010 Census, which came out in March, has decreed that Massachusetts will lose one of its ten Congressional seats. So the State Legislature is busy drawing up a new state map that will shrink the number of Congressional districts by one and will make analogous changes to state legislative districts based on population changes within the state.
Losing a Congressional seat is more the rule than the exception for us these days. The 1980 Census cost us a seat – we went from 12 to 11. We lost another one in 1990. In 2000, we held on to our ten remaining seats. But this year, we’re going from 10 to 9. (We are kept company by states like Pennsylvania, whose current streak of losing censuses is 11. The last census in which Pennsylvania didn’t lose a Congressional seat occurred during the McKinley administration.)
The fact that the Democrats cannot protect all ten incumbent Congresspersons presents an opportunity for the Republicans. They’re looking to repeat their success in the 1990 redistricting. Back then, the GOP emerged from the electoral scrum with two of the ten Congressional seats, helped by a popular Republican Governor, William Weld, who could credibly threaten to veto any redistricting plan too advantageous to the Dems.
This time, the GOP has neither the Governor’s office nor a veto-sustaining number of State Senators. So they must look elsewhere for political advantage.
One of their ideas is the creation of a Congressional district in which the majority of the voting age population is made up of members of racial and ethnic minority groups. They’re hoping this district will be a monster break shot in the redistricting pool game, spreading the other districts far and wide and possibly creating primary matchups between incumbents Mike Capuano and Barney Frank, Stephen Lynch and William Keating, or John Olver and Richard Neal.
A (nominally) non-partisan organization called FairDistrictsMass (the organization must remain officially non-partisan or forfeit its right to collect corporate contributions anonymously) is drawing districts on behalf of the Republicans and has proposed a Congressional district centered in Boston in which 56 percent of the voting age population would be made up of blacks, Latinos and Asians. They’re backing up their proposal with the threat of a federal Voting Rights Act lawsuit to draw attention to disparities between the minority and white communities if the plan that is eventually adopted fails to meet their demands about minority participation.
You might think that the election of Deval Patrick as Governor would have put the issue of minority representation in Massachusetts to rest. But you would be wrong. As the Bay State Banner has pointed out, of the 23 House and Senate seats in Boston, two-thirds are held by whites, even though only half the city’s population is white. Moreover blacks who have advanced in Massachusetts politics — Sheriffs Andrea Cabral and Frank Cousins, former District Attorney Ralph Martin and former U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke — all were either elected as Republicans or appointed by GOP governors. So it is not a surprise that some members of Boston’s minority communities acknowledge that they are natural allies of the Republicans. And for Mike Capuano to point out that the Eighth Congressional district, which includes much of Boston, is already a majority-minority district is rather to miss the point, which is that its Congressman, Mike Capuano, is not black, Latino or Asian.
On the other hand, today’s Republican party, particularly at the national level, is unrecognizable as the same party that Senator Ed Brooke was a member of. In fact, the agenda of the Republican party in the 21st century might well be described as the increasingly frenzied forestalling of the fact that the entire country is on the path to becoming a majority-minority nation.
So can the GOP at the state level recapture the old magic and credibly court minority support? Let’s take a look at some recent evidence.
- The state Republican party in 2011, like its national counterpart, is outspokenly hostile to the voting rights of minorities. Republicans have aggressively backed measures like this one that would have the effect of restricting voting by minorities, poor people and disabled people. So, although the voting age population of the proposed majority-minority district would be 56 percent Latino, black or Asian, there is no way to tell how many of them would in fact be eligible to vote, and, if the if the state’s GOP has its way, the answer will be fewer rather than more.
- Senator Scott Brown, who has announced his backing of the Republican plan for a majority-minority district in Boston, voted earlier this month week to filibuster the judicial nomination of Goodwin Liu, who, if confirmed would have increased the number of Asian-Pacific Americans on the federal appellate bench from one to two. Racial diversity, while a nice thing, is a considerably lower priority for Senator Brown than partisanship. Liu has since withdrawn his nomination.
- And then there’s the discrimination that perpetuates itself, even as overt racial animus subsides. For example, Representative Dan Winslow, the man-behind-the-curtain at FairDistrictsMass, is the sponsor of a bill that would help homeowners in mortgage trouble to secure refinancing. The minority community has been especially devastated by the cumulative effects of the housing crisis. Discrimination in lending leads to higher mortgage costs for minority homeowners, which leads to higher rates of default, which leads to lower credit scores. Representative Winslow’s bill would restrict eligibility for this relief to people with high credit scores, with the result that minorities would receive less than their proportional share of resources, because they had the misfortune to be discriminated against in the first place. In an interview on Emily Rooney’s radio show last month, Representative Winslow predicted that a Voting Rights lawsuit in Boston would win. “Candidly,” he said, “I think we can prove” the existence of racial disparity in Massachusetts. Few of us would give him any argument. And many of us would say that the Republican party, vintage 2011, deserves a fair share of the credit.
