With His Signature On Rigged Election Maps, Call JB Pritzker What He Is – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Even in Illinois politics, Gov. JB Pritzker’s betrayal and dishonesty on fair maps is as shameless and destructive as anything before.

His promises as a candidate and as governor were unequivocal and frequent, summarized in this way by ABC News: “Pritzker voiced support for an independent commission to draw maps and removing political considerations in placing the lines. He vowed to veto any map authored by politicians, such as these.”

Watch him yourself in this video:

Now he has done the opposite.

Worse, he went further than legislative maps, signing on to partisan maps drawn in secret for Illinois Supreme Court elections, the first time they’ve been redrawn in sixty years.

Illinois maps were already rigged in favor of Pritzker’s Democrats, which helped them obtain the supermajorities they hold in both houses of the General Assembly. But the tortured, new map lines are a further leap into the extreme. As summarized by the Wall Street Journal,

Democrats jammed through new state legislative maps that combine 14 Republicans in the Illinois House into seven districts. That means seven GOP incumbents are guaranteed to lose in party primaries. Republicans will also lose their incumbent advantage in seven districts. No Democrats were combined in the same House districts.

Technology has made map drawing all the more powerful and sinister. It was Barack Obama who warned about that as president in a 2016 speech to the Illinois General Assembly. “Technology allows parties in power to precision-draw constituencies so that the opposition’s supporters are packed into as few districts as possible, he said. “ That’s why our districts are shaped like earmuffs or spaghetti.”

Obama warned of another consequences of gerrymandering we’ve seen play out in Illinois. “While it may insulate some incumbents from a serious challenge from the other party, it also means that the main thing those incumbents are worried about are challengers from the most extreme voices in their own party. So our debates move away from the middle, where most Americans are, towards the far ends of the spectrum. And that polarizes us,” he said.

That’s what we have now — extremist incumbents run all of Illinois government and our politics are polarized. Now we’ll have more.

Republicans in control in other states do their own gerrymandering, which is about the only defense offered for Democrats who do it in Illinois. But a promise made to do better without regard to other states is still a promise. It’s what Obama specifically called for. Pritzker betrayed not just his own promises but the express hopes of a president he worked hard to elect.

What’s at stake is whether Illinois’ structure of government today can ever permit it to cease being a one-party state, regardless of what the electorate thinks. The state is already precariously at the edge of illegitimacy, where its people may conclude that their government no longer derives its powers justly – in the manner articulated by the Founders.

That conclusion may be sealed if Pritzker and his party succeed in passing a new state constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November 2022, which would replace the power of the legislature and local governments over labor negotiations with a vast, new open-ended constitutional right.

And now gerrymandering has been extended to the state’s highest court. Republicans had hopes for turning the Illinois Supreme Court away from its record as a Democratic political forum but those hopes, too, are now diminished.

History therefore may eventually record JB Pritzker as the first governor since secession to delegitimize a state government.

In the meantime, many national news outlets are now reporting on Pritzker’s signature on the maps. Commentary thereon will follow. They should call it straight: JB Pritzker is a liar and a fraud.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.