JEFFERSON CITY • Six Missouri appellate judges — who are required to steer clear of partisan politics after they join the bench — were in the middle of high stakes Thursday.
The judges sit on the Appellate Apportionment Commission, which is in charge of redrawing the boundary lines for House and Senate districts to reflect population shifts over the last decade.
The judges got plenty of suggestions at a public hearing that drew a flock of legislators, former legislators, political consultants and party officials to the Kirkpatrick State Office Building.
Some witnesses urged the judges to make minimal changes in the current maps while others suggested a wholesale rewrite that ignores the desires of incumbents and makes districts more competitive.
"Incumbency protection and partisan considerations should be reduced as much as possible," said former Sen. Bob Johnson, a Republican who represented parts of Jackson County in the House and Senate for 23 years.
Judge Lisa White Hardwick of Kansas City, the commission's chairman, said during a break in the testimony that the judges had no particular maps in mind and were starting from scratch.
"None of us have been involved in the redistricting process before, so we are open books," she told reporters.
The commission, which was named by the Missouri Supreme Court, is made up of three judges appointed by Democratic governors and three appointed by Republican governors. Hardwick was appointed to the bench in 2001 by then-Gov. Bob Holden, a Democrat.
The others on the commission include three judges appointed by former Republican Gov. Matt Blunt (Don E. Burrell Jr., Roy L. Richter and James E. Welsh); one additional judge appointed by Holden (Nancy Steffen Rahmeyer); and one judge appointed by former Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan (Robert G. Dowd Jr.).
The commission has until mid-December to come up with new lines for the 163-member House and the 34-member Senate. The judges got the job because bipartisan commissions appointed by Gov. Jay Nixon failed to agree on new boundary lines.
Why the bipartisan commissions failed became clear Thursday, as members of those panels told of their conflicting maps.
Republicans said they worked to draw districts that didn't split counties and that retained, to the maximum extent possible, current district lines. That's not surprising since the GOP currently controls the Senate 26-8 and the House 105-54, with four vacancies.
"The (House Republican) commissioners embraced the concept of minimum change," said Ann Wagner of St. Louis County, a Republican who served as vice chairman of the House panel.
Democrats said that given population shifts, their maps better met the constitutional requirements to evenly distribute the population and ensure African-American representation.
"Merely tweaking the old map does not fulfill the responsibility ... of one-man, one-vote," said Doug Harpool, a former Democratic legislator from Springfield who chaired the Senate Redistricting Commission.
Advocating for wholesale change was a bipartisan pair of former legislators: Johnson, the Jackson County Republican, and former Sen. Joan Bray, a Democrat from University City.
Johnson and Bray formed a nonprofit group called Let Missourians Decide. They said that seats drawn to favor one party or the other lead to uncontested elections and few choices for voters. They pointed to the November 2010 election, when the winner in 95 of the 163 House races took more than two-thirds of the votes cast; in 61 of those cases, there was only one candidate on the ballot.
