“Pat Meehan needs to apologize to everyone involved — including the residents of Delaware County and the other suburbs shoehorned into the 7th District — and then he needs to resign. Today, if possible.”
What did Republican Rep. Meehan do that’s leading to calls for his resignation? Well, let’s let Stephen Colbert explain:
Meehan has already had to give up his seat on the House Ethics Committee, and now he may also have to give up his sweetly rigged district map. I don’t live in Meehan’s 7th District, which has famously been described as looking like “Goofy kicking Donald Duck.”
I live in the 6th District, in that space in between Donald and Goofy — a little bit above Goofy’s right foot. That bizarre, barely contiguous shape was designed to give an edge to Republicans like Meehan and like my own representative, Ryan Costello. The arc at the bottom of the 7th District was drawn by William Penn, but the rest of its intricately crafted outline was drawn by partisan GOP hacks seeking disproportionate representation in Congress. It’s egregious, explicit, and undemocratic.
It’s also — according to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court — illegal. “Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered House map was just struck down,” Andrew Prokop reports:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Monday that the state’s US House maps were based on a Republican partisan gerrymander that violated the state’s constitution — and struck them down.
If the ruling holds, it will be an enormous help to Democrats’ efforts to regain control of the House of Representatives in 2018 — because Pennsylvania’s House map was one of the most wildly biased toward Republicans in the country.
… To get a sense of how powerful Pennsylvania’s gerrymander was, consider that, in 2012, Democratic candidates won slightly more votes in US House elections and Barack Obama won the state. But the state’s 18 House seats didn’t split 9-9 between the parties — instead, Republicans won 13 seats there, and continued to win them for the rest of the decade.
That’s right, Pennsylvania voters cast less than 50 percent of their votes for congressional Republicans, but gerrymandering still gave the GOP 72 percent of the state’s congressional seats. The court is requiring a new district map — one that doesn’t violate the state constitution — by next month.
So Pat Meehan:
1. Is facing calls for his resignation after using taxpayer funds to settle the sexual harassment suit that he had tried to cover up by abusing his position on the Ethics Committee, all of which exposes him as a weird and creepy old guy and an unfaithful husband.
2. Is losing the electoral edge that created his career once the inane inkblot of the 7th District gets redrawn in a fair and constitutional manner. And,
3. He will end up having to run against one of five fired-up, rallied-up Democratic challengers raring to take his seat.
All of that ought to be enough to convince Pat Meehan that it’s time to retire and spend more time with his family, even if he doesn’t think of them as his “soul mates.”
Meanwhile, here in the 6th District, Meehan’s Republican colleague Rep. Ryan Costello seems to be — as Martin Longman put it — “cracking under the pressure.” Costello has cancelled Town Hall meetings, claiming his constituents were trying to lure him out in public into a “death trap.” And he’s so worried about his Democratic opponent — Chrissy Houlahan — that after charity volunteers canvassing his neighborhood knocked on his door, he reported this “incident” to both local and Capitol police as trespassing by likely agents of the nefarious Houlahan campaign. The articles linked here come from two different local papers, but they both have taken the same eye-rolling tone over Costello’s paranoid hijinks. He’s turning himself into a punchline, and that was before news came down that he, too, is losing his gerrymandered advantage.
Both members of Congress are also struggling, in part, due to their close identification with and support for Donald Trump. Voters in the 6th and 7th Districts here have increasingly come to regard Donald Trump as, well, as Donald Trump — meaning they tend to involuntarily make that face that all decent people make at the mention of his name. Meehan and Costello vote with Trump far too much to run against their association, and running with that association doesn’t help them.
So prospects for re-election seem slim for both Meehan and Costello. But then again, it’s only January. The mid-term election is still 10 months away, so Meehan and Costello have plenty of time to continue spiraling downwards. And in the meantime, for their constituents who deserve better, there’s work to be done.
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