Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood says he’d like to see the power of drawing congressional district maps given to the citizens.
“What some states have gone to is commissions, where citizens look at the population of a state. They look at the fact that districts should be compact and contiguous, and then they draw the lines,” said LaHood, a Republican who represented the Peoria area in Congress before joining President Barack Obama’s cabinet.
“Computers don’t draw the lines. Politicians don’t draw the lines, political staff don’t draw the lines. Common, ordinary citizens.”
LaHood’s comments came as he joined fellow former Democratic Illinois U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, and U.S. Rep. Bob Dold, a Republican, at Bradley University for a recent panel discussion on bipartisanship presented by the Dirksen Congressional Center and hosted by NPR’s Ron Elving.
The conversation comes as Republicans in Texas and Democrats in California seek to redraw districts to strengthen their congressional delegations ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
“Allowing citizens to draw lines that are compact and contiguous is a lot better than allowing politicians to pick their own constituents and draw lines that make little or no sense to the voting public,” said LaHood.
Bustos, who represented part of the Peoria area for five terms before choosing not to seek reelection in 2022, said having balanced districts would force elected officials to appeal to moderates from both political parties.
“Typically, the most bipartisan members of Congress are from those kind of districts because the voters back home, that’s what they want,” said Bustos. “And if you want to be successful politically, then you can’t be extreme right or extreme left if you are in a moderate — if you’re in a district that’s a 50/50-ish district.”
Although she chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2020, Bustos said she needed to maintain a moderate stance in representing Illinois’ 17th District that swung 17 percentage points from Obama in 2012 to President Donald Trump in 2016.
“So to survive those districts, you better be able to navigate and not be extreme one way or another,” she said, acknowledging a moderate stance at times didn’t sit well with colleagues from her own party.
“For me, it was maybe the farther left members of the Democratic caucus that were hard on me; like, dealing with Republicans across the aisle was a lot easier, sometimes, than people within the within our own party.
“I remember a colleague once said to me she just could not understand why I was voting a certain way. I used to take kind of heat from her a lot, and I would say, ‘You know, I get this feeling that you think maybe you know this congressional district that I represent better than I do.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And I said, ‘OK, we’re done talking about this.’”
Dold, who served two non-consecutive terms representing the Democratic-leaning 10th District in northeastern Illinois, expressed a similar desire to see more politically balanced district boundaries.
“If you gave me a magic wand and said, ‘What one thing would you do to make Congress more bipartisan today,’ it would be redistricting reform across the country,” said Dold. “If you drew more 50/50-type districts, trust me, you’d have a lot more bipartisanship.
“You’d have a lot more members of Congress that would have to go back and have to listen to that minority side or the opposite party side because at the end of the day they’re going to need to have some of those Democratic or Republican votes.”
In addition to the proliferation of gerrymandered districts, LaHood pointed to the rise of partisan cable news networks, the decline of newspapers, and the emergence of cellphones, email and social media as factors inhibiting bipartisanship.
“The idea that you don’t have to look somebody in the eye and confront them — ‘We don’t disagree, or we do disagree’ — those days are gone, because it’s all being communicated through these kind of technological advances,” said LaHood.
“We communicate, we say things on these devices that we would never say to somebody and look them in the eye.”
