Weiser’s Anti-Trump Agenda Comes at Taxpayer Expense

By: Rob Natelson | Complete Colorado

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser says he favors trashing Colorado’s legislative reapportionment system to get more Democrat members of Congress elected.

His statement offers some useful instruction in how, when conservatives make political deals with the left, it usually comes back to bite them.

The current reapportionment system resulted from such a deal. It was made only seven years ago and ratified overwhelmingly by the voters. Now Weiser wants to renege.

The Colorado background

In 2018, Coloradans voted for Amendments Y and Z. Amendment Y transferred the job of drawing congressional districts from the state legislature to an independent commission. Amendment Z did the same for state legislative districts.

I voted against both. One reason is that I generally oppose moving political decisions away from the people’s representatives and lodging them in administrative agencies. Doing so is undemocratic, and it doesn’t take the politics out of the decisions. It just hides the politics from public view.

Another reason is that lawmakers who gerrymander have to explain their conduct to the voters. An independent commission never has to do that.

A third reason is that experience with a similar commission in another state convinced me that they tend to be captured by the political left. This is true of government agencies generally, because conservatives spend time living real lives, but “progressives” live for politics: Politics are what theologian Paul Tillich would call their “ultimate concern.”

Many conservatives of impeccable credentials did not agree with me about Amendments Y and Z. They saw the left’s tightening grip on the state legislature, and thought an independent commission would be a better place to lodge reapportionment decisions. Their left-right coalition was reflected in the campaign finance figures: Proponents of Amendments Y and Z raised and spent $6 million. Opponents raised and spent nothing.

I also doubted that “progressives” would keep the bargain if it became inconvenient for them. Weiser’s announcement is confirmation of that.

Now let’s examine some context.

The national context

In Texas, reapportionment is still the prerogative of the legislature, and the legislature recently exercised that authority to create more Republican congressional districts. The legislature could defend this action as a response to the state’s huge population growth and its increasingly Republican hue.

The response of California Democratic officials was less defensible. The state’s population has stagnated recently, and its “independent” commission already had gerrymandered congressional districts to favor Democrats: Although Republicans garner nearly 40 percent of the vote in California, they hold only 17 percent of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (nine of 52).

But for California Democrats, that wasn’t good enough: They shifted the redistricting process back to the heavily-Democratic legislature with the goal of getting rid of the remaining congressional Republicans.

Now Weiser has just shown that he’s in the running for the Independence Institute’s “Californian of the Year Award.” He wants to pull the same stunt in Colorado.

Weiser’s record

As Attorney General, Weiser has the obligation to fight crime. Colorado’s soaring crime statistics show that he hasn’t done a very good job.

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