Butler: Congressional Map Protects Democratic Members of Congress
Rep. Tim Butler (R-Springfield) speaks about legislative maps at a media event earlier this year. Butler is the top Republican on the House Redistricting Committee.
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The top Republican on the House Redistricting Committee says Democrats have introduced a congressional map that splits up communities like counties and towns all across the state.
Rep. Tim Butler (R-Springfield) has been an outspoken advocate during the legislative and congressional mapmaking process for independent redistricting. He says the Democratic majority has made it clear in its congressional map that they’re protecting Democratic members of Congress.
“The Democrats can talk all they want about transparency and minority voting rights, which all of us are concerned about,” Butler said. “But when the rubber meets the road, the draft map that they’ve put out there is going to be a very [politically] gerrymandered map to try to elect more Democrats to protect Nancy Pelosi.”
While politically gerrymandered districts have been upheld by courts over the years, Butler says nobody should be getting away with it.
“Just because political gerrymandering has been determined to be ok by the U.S. Supreme Court, which it has in a previous decision, that doesn’t make it right,” Butler said. “Because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.”
As for the outstanding lawsuit on the legislative map, Butler says the court is taking a serious look at overturning the plan passed by the General Assembly in September.
“[These suits] continue to have concerns about minority districts,” he said. “That’s a very large thing for the federal court system when it comes to redistricting, is making sure that, both on the congressional and state level, we are respecting minority voting rights and opportunities for minority populations to elect candidates of their choice.”
Butler says Republicans and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) stand on “fairly good ground” to get the legislative map overturned.
Many Democrats have criticized Republicans for failing to produce their own maps, even though Butler says they would be ignored by the majority. He says if the situation were reversed, he doesn’t believe Republicans would have gone forward drawing the maps.
“I would hope that we would live up to our word and another way to draw [these maps],” he said. “Hypothetically, if we were in the majority, could there be a different way of doing it? Sure. The precedent that we set this year on how we do the process will probably set the precedent moving forward, unfortunately.”
I mention it in the video but want to put it here, too. Just in the interest of full disclosure, Rep. Butler and I worked together on Rodney Davis’ first congressional race in 2012. I also reached out to both House and Senate Democrats asking for interviews with the Chair or Vice Chair of their redistricting committees, and neither caucus responded to our requests.
