LET'S BEGIN with words of encouragement for Marty Meehan, the congressman whose district will vanish if the state's political map is redrawn the way House speaker Tom Finneran has proposed. The words are these:
"If you asked legislators to draw a map in which Barney Frank would never be a congressman again, this would be it."
 Representative Marty Meehan |
But Frank won that election — and every election since. The moral of the story is that just because your district gets carved out from under you by unfriendly legislators, it doesn't mean your political career is over.
In Bay State politics, the winds of popularity are variable. In 1982, the ultraliberal Frank's fans in the Legislature could have been tallied on the fingers of two hands. Today, the speaker of the Massachusetts House proposes to make his district even more liberal-friendly. With the addition of Cambridge and Boston's Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhoods, Tom Finneran said last week, the 4th District could make Frank "congressman for life and any eternal afterlife." Meehan may feel unloved by state legislators today. Things may be different tomorrow.
So much for words of encouragement. Now some words of realism: Live by the sword, die by the sword.
When the congressional map was redrawn after the 1990 census, the 5th District was represented by Chester Atkins. The new map removed Framingham, a city in which he had always run well, and left him with Lowell and Lawrence, two cities where he had always had trouble. No one pretended the damage wasn't deliberate: Governor William Weld gloated that he had "settled Chet Atkins's hash." Weld had meant to set up the district for a Republican. As it turned out, he'd set it up for Meehan, a Democrat with a strong Lowell base. Meehan walked through the door Beacon Hill had opened.
In other words, redistricting made Meehan a congressman. Now it may unmake him. Meehan has reason to complain, of course. So did Atkins.
I don't pretend to know Finneran's real motive. The know-it-alls say Meehan is being punished because he criticized Finneran for undercutting the Clean Elections law the voters adopted last year. Would Finneran really be so unreasonable? Could be. Politicians have reasons that reason cannot understand.
But low motives or not, Finneran has produced a map that is miles better than the one currently in use.
Right now, the state's congressional districts are among the ugliest things in US politics. With their tangled twists and incestuous slitherings, they look like something Jackson Pollock might have dripped onto a canvas. When they were adopted in 1992, they were lambasted. Then-House Speaker Charles Flaherty called them "an abomination." Steven Grossman, the Democratic chairman, said they were "atrocious." The Globe's Alex Beam asked, "Who drew these maps? Mr. Magoo?"
Worse than unsightly, the current district scheme is incoherent. It chops Fall River in two, lumping half in the 3d District with Worcester, and half in the 4th with Brookline. It gives Nantucket and Quincy, which have next to nothing in common, the same member of Congress, but three different ones to Wellesley, Weston, and Wayland, which are as close to identical as three adjoining towns can be.
In addition to Fall River, it breaks up 13 municipalities — not just populous cities like Boston and Brockton, but tiny towns like Lunenburg (pop. 9,411) and Lancaster (6,634). It denies a congressional seat to Southeastern Massachusetts, the fastest growing part of the state, while Boston and its suburbs get six. It puts Fitchburg and Leominster in the Western Massachusetts district, but excludes Northampton and Chicopee.
Finneran's proposal doesn't cure all these problems, but it goes a long way toward restoring sense and elegance to the state's congressional map. Under his plan, no city or town except Boston is split between districts. The 3d, 4th, and 9th congressional districts are transformed from an impression of writhing snakes into comprehensible geographical units. Southeastern Massachusetts at long last gets its own representative in Congress. Communities of interest — Worcester and the I-495 corridor, for example — are grouped together; sections of the state with little in common, like Brookline and Buzzards Bay, are kept apart. (One thing it doesn't do, all the hype to the contrary, is create a "majority-minority" district. The redrawn 8th District would be 54.6 percent white.)
Political and geographic coherence — not incumbent protection — should be the first priority in reapportioning congressional districts. As even Marty Meehan must admit, Finneran's map meets that standard.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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