Editorial: Another arc of history points toward redistricting

With all the news coming out of the Supreme Court the last few days, it could be easy for Illinoisans to overlook a decision involving politics in Arizona. But make no mistake, the arc of history runs as surely through the court's ruling in Arizona State Legislature vs. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission as through its declarations on the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage.

Citizens, the court ruled, can demand that their state legislatures draw fair election boundaries, and if the legislatures don't, the citizens can do it for them. That, in short, is the situation facing Illinois voters as a renewed drive gets under way to put a redistricting question on the November 2016 state ballot. The Independent Map Amendment would require legislative boundaries to be drawn by an 11-member commission selected through an intensive process designed to ensure fairness, diversity and equality without regard to incumbency or partisan leanings.

The group promoting the amendment, the Independent Map Amendment Coalition, formed earlier this year after a similar effort last year stumbled in the courts on matters in the state constitution involving the structure of the proposed redistricting commission and the quality of petitions - both of which have been addressed in the new initiative. The Arizona case was even more fundamental. There, if you can imagine, lawmakers argued that citizens don't even have a federal constitutional right to determine how their legislative districts are formed - that that is a right specifically reserved for state legislatures.

Lawmakers want it, of course, so that they can draw maps that consolidate their party's power and protect incumbents - the precise circumstance in Illinois, where after two decades of manipulating political cartography, Democrats have established solid control of both branches of the General Assembly and where political challenges are so pointless that in last November's legislative elections only two of 19 state Senate races were considered competitive and only 47 of 118 state House seats were even contested.

Its fundamental right to exist now affirmed, Illinois' Independent Map Amendment "continues full speed ahead," in the words of coalition Executive Director Cynthia Canary, whose group is circulating petitions to get the issue on the ballot.

And, thus also, one more people-focused issue takes its place on the right side of history. Illinois lawmakers, of course, could find themselves there, too, if they were listening to the court, and they could save citizens a lot of time and trouble, if they would simply put the amendment question on the ballot themselves.

That being unlikely in the extreme, we'll simply take this opportunity to call your attention to where the arc of history is pointing on legislative redistricting and urge you sign or even circulate the petition to get the issue on the ballot in November 2016.