The new map significantly alters the 3rd, 6th and 7th districts, roughly splitting constituencies in those districts evenly among Democratic, Republican and independent voters.

The 3rd District, currently represented in Congress by Republican Scott Tipton, arcs around the western half of the state, where Rocky Mountains slope into high desert on the far western and southern ends and where on the south-eastern end of the district, grassland begins its long stretch into the great American prairie. The district has long been moderately conservative. Tipton unseated “blue dog” or moderate Democrat John Salazar last year.

“The district is a toss-up district and remains a toss-up district,” Pace told the Colorado Independent weeks ago, before Republicans appealed Hyatt’s decision accepting the Democratic map. Pace said Hyatt demonstrated a keen understanding of the character of the district. Pace, like the Democrats who drew the maps, stressed shared interest for the district communities tied mostly to water and oil and gas.

“The 3rd District from Alamosa to Rifle shares a lot of commonly held values and I think that was reflected in the map the judge chose,” Pace said.

“It’s exciting to have Leadville and Lake County in the 3rd with the headwaters of the Arkansas River. There are a lot of similar water issues and concerns at the headwaters as there are in other parts of the district. I think that’s a nice symbiotic relationship and a good addition.

“Eagle county is an exciting addition. The county has a lot of the land-use issues, water issues, oil and gas drilling that are consistent in other parts of the district.

“There was a problem before when the Roaring Fork Valley was split between two congressional districts. The Roaring Fork Valley is all in one district with the inclusion of western Eagle and I think that’s important for keeping together communities of interest.”

New Colorado CD3

Former Colorado CD3

The new map places Las Animas County on the southern border with New Mexico into the Fourth District. Pace said he wasn’t concerned about the district losing the traditionally Democratic Latino voters in the city of Trinidad.

“The Latino population is the fastest growing in the state and has a significant percentage in the 3rd Congressional District. Anyone running for Congress has to ensure they are listening to the concerns of the Latino population. And the concerns of the Latino population are lagely about [expanding] jobs and quality education for everybody.”

The suburban Denver 6th Congressional District, represented by Republican Mike Coffman, endured the most dramatic changes. A longtime Republican stronghold, the district is now a tossup by all measures.

Republicans assailed the new map, arguing that it threw off important factors in order to alter long-standing district lines for partisan gain.

Judge Hyatt and the state Supreme Court, however, agreed with Democrats who argued that establishing competitiveness had to be among the top priorities in considering any new configuration. Judge Hyatt and the state’s high court justices agreed. They also agreed that district lines drawn a decade ago no longer reflect the shifted demographics of the state.

Democratic attorney Mark Grueskin hailed the decision as not just a victory for Colorado Democrats but for enlightened redistricting efforts coast to coast.

“This is an incredibly important day for Colorado and, hopefully, the country. This map was all about accountability.”

Many political analysts see contemporary congressional district maps that lump Republican constituencies and Democratic constituencies into different districts as a main force behind the arch-partisan politics that have gridlocked Washington. Competitive districts, at least theoretically, force representatives to consider ideas and proposals put forward by constituents and members of Congress outside of their own partisan circles. Election campaigns in competitive districts cannot succeed by targeting only the most partisan primary voters.

Additional reporting by Troy Hooper.

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Brewer, acting in response to Tea Party agitation and on behalf of Republican lawmakers dissatisfied with the redistricting plan drawn up by the commission, removed Matthis, claiming she had demonstrated “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”

Twenty-one Senate Republicans backed Brewer to provide the two-thirds senate vote she needed to remake the five-member commission, which was created by voters to take the highly partisan, once-a-decade work of redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers. The commission consists of two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent. Matthis is the independent. According to the Arizona Republic, Brewer had targeted the two Democrats as well but could not secure the votes to remove them.

Similar wrangling in states over redistricting and voting laws has been a top political story this year.

After the midterm elections of 2010 swept Republican majorities into state houses across the country, decades of legislation meant to expand the franchise by flattening barriers to participation in elections ground to a halt. Laws raising hurdles to voter registration and ballot casting cropped up in states across the country, pushed by Republicans arguing the need to protect against voter fraud. The roughly 20 laws passed in state capitols this year would make it more difficult for more than 5 million eligible citizens to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

In Colorado, the election of 2010 delivered a split legislature, with Democrats running the Senate and Republicans running the House. To almost no one’s surprise, legislative redistricting efforts broke down among partisan bickering during last spring’s session. Republicans are now appealing a congressional redistricting map presented by a court. A judge also recently turned back as unacceptable state district reapportionment maps.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a longtime Republican partisan campaign finance and election law attorney who won office last year, has made national news by seeking the power to throw suspected undocumented citizens off the voter rolls and for attempting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to legally registered inactive voters.

He cited the need to combat fraud in both cases without ever presenting credible evidence that there was any fraud occurring in the state.

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Boulder Democrat Jared Polis, likely in no danger next year in his largely liberal 2nd Congressional District, said on Wednesday it might make sense to incorporate Larimer County and Colorado State University into his district, which already includes the University of Colorado in Boulder.

“Having CSU and CU in the same district will allow whoever the member is to focus their own resources and their staff resources more on higher education issues,” Polis said, according to the Associated Press. Polis’s district also extends west into the mountains to include Eagle and Summit counties.

There has been significant political chatter in the mountain counties sitting on the border between Polis’s CD2 and Republican Scott Tipton’s 3rd Congressional District, which sprawls all the way from Democratic-leaning Pueblo on the southern Front Range to dead-red Grand Junction on the far Western Slope.

Some of the six maps being weighed in district court would split off parts of Eagle County and lump them in with Tipton’s district. Oil and gas drilling and mining concerns on public lands are much bigger issues in CD3, which includes heavily drilled Garfield County just to the west of Polis’s mountain enclave.

According to AP, Polis, responding to questioning from a Republican attorney about a Democratic plan to put rural and GOP-leaning Larimer County in his district, said that while the oil and gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing may not be a major issue in Larimer County it is still a big issue for area residents.

Polis has championed legislation to disclose chemicals used in the fracking process as well as mandate better air quality standards. Still, fracking is far more of an issue in Tipton’s CD3 than Polis’s current CD2.

Tipton, who testified earlier in the week, said he prefers the current Republican plan of maintaining the status quo to the Democratic tactic of seeking more “competitive” districts. He pointed out that Democrats held five of the seven U.S. congressional seats in 2008 and that Republicans regained the majority with four of seven seats in 2010. Plus, he added that Democrat John Salazar held the seat before him.

“If your point is you want to be competitive, that’s pretty doggone competitive, to be able to see those sorts of turns,” Tipton told the AP.

Despite voting against climate change legislation, Salazar was targeted by oil and gas money in 2010. Tipton has made reinvigorating Western Slope mining and drilling a top priority, while simultaneously trying to dial back federal environmental regulations.

Democrat Ed Perlmutter also testified Wednesday, speaking in favor of the Democratic “competitiveness” plan. The Dem’s map would take part of Aurora from Perlmutter’s 7th Congressional District and put it in Republican Mike Coffman’s 6th Congressional District.

“It forces people running for office to reach out a lot and to engage as many people as possible,” Perlmutter said of districts more evenly split amongst Democrats, Republicans and independents. “You have to listen to all views.”

The Democratic map generally seeks more competitive districts in CD3 and CD6 while giving up ground in Republican Cory Gardner’s CD4. The Republican map seeks “minimum disruption.”

The redistricting trial is slated to run through the end of the week, with the judge’s decision expected by December. The redistricting process is conducted every 10 years to reflect new U.S. Census population data.

Colorado Sixth District Congressman Mike Coffman is making national headlines for trotting out a Glenn Beck-style Obama conspiracy theory on Denver talk radio. He said the president is secretly working to grant citizenship to millions of undocumented residents who will return the favor by voting for Obama next November. That’s great radio except, as Colorado media watchdogger Jason Salzman points out, illegal residents can’t become citizens until they’re legal residents, and none of that could happen for any of them by anywhere close to Election Day. More than that, the theory dovetailed with a bill Coffman recently sponsored to strip languages other than English from voter ballots, the two taken together making Coffman seem provocatively anti-Latino. The “undocumented resident voter” theory isn’t the only out-there bit Coffman has delivered lately. His handlers might have pulled in the reins after the loose nuggets he tossed out at a GOP fundraiser in Denver last week.

The Colorado Statesman’s Ernest Luning was at the event Thursday August 18 and reported on Coffman’s remarks.

The congressman opened by explaining his vote in favor of the debt-ceiling deal. It was a tough vote, he said. It would have been easier to vote against it because then he “could have told conservative audiences he stood in the way of more government borrowing and he could have told liberal audiences he had drawn the line against deep spending cuts.”

“Told liberal audiences”?

Democrats in the state have been working hard in the ongoing battle over redistricting to redraw Coffman’s district to include many more Democratic voters. If they succeed, Coffman may have to begin explaining his votes to “liberal audiences.” Until then, he’s more likely to hold fast to his present strategy of ignoring them altogether.

Coffman moved from there on to the debate over growth in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“If not for Republican control of the House of Representatives,” he said, “we wouldn’t be having that debate at all. This country would be simply slipping into insolvency.”

“If we act soon, we can turn this around,” he said. “If not, we’re going to be in a Greece-like situation where there’ll be so many folks depending on the government that there’ll be civil disturbances in this country.”

So, if not for Republican control of the House, the nation would be “slipping into insolvency”? And we could expect a “Greece-like situation” of civil disturbances due to government dependence?

Coffman is talking mainly here about Social Security and Medicare, isn’t he? These mostly serve retired people, and Social Security is a solid program. There is no shortage of funds. As Luning notes, it’s running a surplus based on payroll tax hikes instituted during the Reagan years.

On the matter of individual dependency on the government in the U.S., has Coffman ever looked at any data comparing such dependency here with government dependency in any other developed nation in the world? Probably not, but alarmism has become the stock in trade of Obama-era GOP politics as well as the stock in trade of Colorado GOP fundraisers under new “moderate” Chairman Ryan Call.

Coffman closed with a piece on the recent low popularity of Congress.

“People complain about Washington today. I think we have an approval rating of– 13 percent, is it?”

“Historically,” Luning notes Coffman said with a grin, “we’ve been somewhere between pedophiles and trial lawyers, and pedophiles are passing us up.”

That was roughly last week. His people thought he was ready for a round on the radio this week.

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Update: Dems release map that would sacrifice ground in CD4 to make CD3 and CD6 more competitive (see image below).

The battle in Colorado over the shape of next decade’s congressional districts continues. State Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio fired off a response to the latest proposed map released by state Republicans. Democrats want to draw more competitive districts. Republicans want to effectively retain existing districts. Democrats argue that competition will result in greater lawmaker responsiveness and less partisanship. Republicans say they are seeking to avoid disruption and retain communities of interest.

“Republicans are sending a clear message to Colorado voters for the next decade: when it comes to your representation in Congress, your opinion and your vote won’t matter, Palacio is quoted to say in a release. “The GOP is trying to freeze the status quo while Coloradans are demanding a real say in who speaks for them in Washington.

“Competitive districts force representatives to pay attention to every voter and every issue, not just those of their political base. And competitive districts reflect Colorado’s political makeup, where voters equally identify as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated from any party.”

The Republican map was reportedly released Friday. Democrats are set to release their map this afternoon.

When the state legislature last session failed to pass district boundaries updated according to recent census data, lawsuits redirected the task to federal district Judge William Hood, who will begin to hear arguments in mid October. Hood ordered the party maps released in advance of the coming trial so various stakeholders and community-of-interest representatives set to give testimony could adequately prepare.

A strategic endeavor with long-term consequences, redistricting is as much poker as demographic science. There’s no secret that both parties are angling for advantage.

As Lynn Bartels at the Denver Post reports, Republicans called their latest map “Minimum Disruption,” a title mocked by Democrats as a name more suitable to a “light jazz quartet.”

The Republican map would seem to create predictably partisan districts. Swing district CD3, currently held by Republican Scott Tipton, would include more GOP voters, as would recently purple CD4, presently held by Republican Cory Gardner. CD7, represented by Democrat Ed Perlmutter, would include more Democrats.

For their part, state Democrats have reportedly targeted CD6, currently represented by Republican Mike Coffman, for the most change. Coffman’s district is mostly suburban Denver, an area where Democrats are betting the population is most likely to trend left in coming years. In moving favorable voting areas into CD6, however, Democrats may also be taking a right-leaning district like CD4 out of contention.

Click on the maps to enlarge them:

Republican map:

Democratic map:

Current district boundaries:

After the 2008 election, Democrats represented five of the state’s seven congressional districts. In the 2010 election, Democrats lost two of those districts to Republicans, CD3 and CD4.

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After months of intense talks and partisan attempts to rearrange congressional districts by Republicans and Democrats, the Colorado General Assembly’s redistricting attempt failed to produce a map. The Senate State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee killed an amended Republican map, moving the battle out of the Legislature–at least for now.

While a Democratic map still sits in the Senate with no time for passage, for all practical purposes Tuesday’s committee vote proved to be the last chance either side will have to accomplish what has not been done for thirty years–redraw congressional redistricting lines.

Last-minute attempts to create a compromise went on in secret throughout the day, one of those being broken up when members of the press attempted to use sunshine laws to gain entrance.

Democrats have charged throughout that Speaker of the House Frank McNulty has inserted himself into redistricting conversations that he had not been invited to.

Republicans brought a map similar to the Colorado Communities Map already rejected by Democrats earlier in the process. In contrast to the Democratic map, it kept the Eastern Plains wholly in CD 4 and ensured that Douglas County down to Fremont county were not in a district with Boulder, which would keep CD 6 firmly in U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman’s hands.

Democrats overall said the maps had been drawn to favor Republicans and refused to pass the bill out of committee.

“I am still against competitive districts,” Francine Thompson from Douglas County testified, in favor of the Republican bill. “To have one third Democrat, one third Republican and one third unaffiliated to me doesn’t make much sense… I live in Douglas County because it is conservative and we do a very good job at keeping Republicans in office.”

Senator Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, told Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, who brought the amended map to the committee, that though he respected Brophy’s decision to build maps that protected his party’s positions he could not support the map.

Brophy told Heath that his map shaped districts in a manner that created four districts which were within a one digit percentage in voter registration, as Heath had requested the night before during a Democratic filibustering of his own Senate map proposal.

“I believe that this map represents the wishes of the vast majority of the people who live in Colorado,” Brophy said. “It make minimal changes from existing district lines and I think that is important also.”

Heath, after looking at the map, said that the bill essentially reduces the number of Democrats in comparison to Republicans in each competitive district, including the battleground 7th Congressional District, currently held by Rep. Ed Perlmutter. He said the overture to competitiveness did not appear sincere from the map in front of him.

“I just can’t support a map that basically locks in five districts (where) people have a very good chance of being congress-men or -women for life,” Heath said. “We tried. You tried. And I respect that.”

Democrats under their bill would have seen CD 1 and CD 5 as Democratic and Republican strongholds respectively, while creating 5 relatively competitive districts, four districts favoring Republicans overall. Current maps have Democrats holding the controling margin in three districts and Republicans in four.

“Everybody knows that any type of redistricting is about giving their political party an advantage if they can do it. That’s just axiomatic,” Rep. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins said. “And so here we are, we are saying that we don’t necessarily want to give the Democratic Party priority or the Republican, but let’s make them competitive,” Bacon said. “It is my firm belief that unless you allow competitiveness you allow each political party to nominate somebody on the fringe. That isn’t how you get good public policy.”

Rep. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, begged for the party to pass the bill if only to ensure that it be heard on the Senate floor. Heath, however, said he had no appetite to continue a debate he said showed little chance of success.

Talks broke down last week with Senate and House leadership after both sides came close to reaching a compromise. Senate President Brandon Shaffer said that they had come within 5 percent of an agreement a number of times, but McNulty would walk out of the talks only to return to say ”not just no, but hell no.”

McNulty, however, said it was Shaffer’s desire to carve out a district for his own political ambitions that led to failure.  

The federally mandated redistricting process can now either be done in a costly special session or it can be taken to the court, where lawsuits will likely drive the cost of the bill up even further.

DENVER– It’s closing time. The swing-state Colorado legislature has one day left in the regular session this year for Republicans and Democrats to come together and deliver a congressional redistricting plan to the governor. The Republican-controlled House managed to pass its version onto the Senate this morning and, after a stop-and-start filibuster that stretched into the wee hours last night, the Democratic-controlled Senate today moved its version forward for a final reading.

At a capitol press conference held minutes ago, Senate President Brandon Shaffer said the House redistricting bill has been assigned to the Senate State Affairs Committee.

There are seven congressional districts in Colorado. Four seats are presently held by Republicans and three by Democrats. The Fourth District seat has swung between the two parties in the last two elections.

Lawmakers in Denver and their supporters around the state have been wrangling to present maps shaped by different priorities. Democrats have been working to establish competitive districts while Republicans have been working mostly to maintain communities of interest, where smaller conservative western slope populations, for instance, wouldn’t be represented by lawmakers popular with residents of larger front-range cities and suburbs.

Rep. B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland (CD4), said the judicial guidelines put in place by the legislature support the map passed by the House.

“This is a fair map. This is a good map,” she said.  

Concessions floated in the House that seemed to be gaining traction at first, fell through, and House Democrats unanimously abandoned the plan. Republicans hold a one-seat majority in the House and the bill passed by exactly one vote, 33 to 32.

The Republican bill leaves the district maps essentially as they have been for the last ten years. Most analysts say the maps create two competitive districts in addition to three safely Republican and two safely Democratic districts.

“We have the criteria. We have the road map in place,” Mark Waller, R-Colorado Springs, said. “This map has followed that road map.”

Rep. David Balmer, R-Centennial, said that only one chamber of the General Assembly has been serious about passing a redistricting plan. He complained that this year was the perfect opportunity to carve out a bipartisan map but that Democrats were trying less to do that than they were merely trying to proffer a bill for a lawsuit.

Democrats have benefited from relying on the courts to decide on the districts in the past. Courts overturned a map drawn and rushed through in the dark of night last time around by majority Republicans.

Balmer said that, despite the fact that the Senate is struggling to compromise and already weathered a filibuster, he thought legislators could succeed in getting a map to the governor by midnight Wednesday.

–
Additional writing and reporting by John Tomasic.

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Redistricting happens every 10 years. It’s the law. It’s never pretty and it’s seldom fair, but it always gets done. Last time, it took until 2007 before the U.S. Supreme Court finally said enough is enough.

Will Colorado go down that road again this year? No one knows. Democrats and Republicans will either compromise or they can carry their briefcases from the Capitol to the Court House. It is up to them.

“The congressional redistricting fight won’t end when Gov. Bill Owens signs the bill that the House will presumably send him today. A court date awaits,” so begins a Rocky Mountain News article from May 7, 2003.

Things change, and yet they don’t. This time around, if Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature can actually compromise and pass a redistricting bill through both houses, the governor would probably sign it and that would probably be the end of it.

The odds of that happening are hard to calculate though. Some observers think redistricting will probably go back to the courts. Others think the legislature will get the job done, either now or in a special session.

On the one hand, you have Republicans in the House committed to a redistricting plan that would keep most district lines close to where they are now but would also tilt the deck ever so slightly to benefit Republicans and create several safer seats. Democrats on the other hand, say they are committed to competitive districts but at the price of moving lines more substantially.

“I would like to see the Legislature do it,” former legislator Ken Gordon told the Colorado Independent. Gordon is now a law professor.

“First of all, it’s their job. If they don’t do it, they look incompetent and political. On a good day, legislators have about a twenty percent approval rating. I’d like to see them rise above that and do their jobs.”

Gordon said he wants to see competitive districts, “where elections actually matter. Give people a reason to think their votes count.”

He said when you have non-competitive districts, then general elections no longer matter and only the primaries matter. “In primaries like that, it is people who push into the fringes who tend to win. Then you end up electing people who don’t just disagree with the other side, you elect people who think the other side is evil. When that happens it becomes hard to legislate.

“When you have competitive districts, then everyone is heard because elected representatives know they need to represent everyone in order to be re-elected.”

Finally, Gordon warned that legislators working on redistricting today need to listen to their constituents but should not give undue influence to elected members of congress or political parties.

“The people want competitive districts but political parties and sitting congress people have a conflict of interest. They want an advantage for themselves, but that is not what is in the interest of the people,” Gordon said.

From another May 7, 2003, Rocky article:

The debate was so rancorous that lawmakers met in face-to-face shouting matches, an upset staffer wept during a hearing and Democrats were barred from speaking.

The GOP is resolute in redrawing the district boundary maps in favor of Republicans – the first redrawing of congressional lines in mid-decade in 40 years.

The current congressional redistricting map was drawn by Denver District Court Judge John Coughlin last year after a Republican-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate could not reach a compromise.

It’s possible that things have not gotten so out of hand yet this year, but the parallels are telling. There has already been plenty of name-calling, plenty of partisan accusations that each side cares more about creating advantage than about doing the right thing for the voters of Colorado.

The Legislature is charged with redistricting every ten years after the national census. Every decade, some states lose congressional seats and some states gain seats. Colorado gained a seat 10 years ago, but this time held steady at seven. On its face, then, redistricting this year is not quite as important politically as it was a decade ago. Still, some of the existing districts grew faster than others in the last 10 years and so adjustments to the lines need to be made to give each district roughly the same number of voters.

As always, both parties see the chance to gain an advantage. As always, both parties cloak their advantage seeking in the language of fairness, competitiveness and keeping communities of interest together.

“The problem is… you can very much effect future elections by how you draw the lines. If one party can control the process, they can really make a difference,” Colorado College political science professor Bob Loevy told the Colorado Independent.

He said both parties want to create one or two districts that the other party can win easily with something like 70-30 or 80-20 margins and then give themselves smaller majorities in the rest of the districts.

“You want your opponent’s districts to have 80 percent majorities, so Republicans want to cram as many Democrats as possible into one or two districts and then give themselves 55-45 or 60-40 margins in the rest of the districts. The Democrats want the opposite, naturally.

“It is very much a high-stakes game,” he said. “That’s why the gunfire.”

Loevy said he thought Judge Coughlin did a great job in creating the maps last time and thinks letting the judiciary create the maps is an ideal solution to the problem of partisan gerrymandering.

Ten years ago, when the Legislature couldn’t agree on a set of maps, both sides were told to submit their best, fairest map to the judge. According to Loevy, who sat in on the hearings then, the Democrats submitted the better, fairer maps and theirs were largely adopted by the judge.

“I thought the voters were well-served by Coughlin. He did as good a job as could be done. I think we should institutionalize that. Let each side submit their best map to the Chief Justice and let the courts decide.

“The fairness of that map was borne out by the 2010 election, where Republicans gained two seats in Colorado. That’s how swing districts are supposed to work. When the mood swings from one party to another, swing districts change hands,” Loevy said.

This year, he said, it looks like the Democrats are pushing for an advantage a little harder than the Republicans. “And that makes sense. Republicans now have four of seven seats, so they like the status quo. They are content to make adjustments on the edges, whereas it looks like the Democrats would like to gain a little edge in the 3rd district.”

He said he thinks that ultimately the Legislature will get the job done this year, avoiding another court case. He says there just isn’t that much to be worked out this time.

If legislators know their history, if they remember what happened last time, it might give them pause as they consider their options this time.

It wasn’t just that legislators failed to do their jobs after the last census. It was that after the courts stepped in, Republicans, once they got control of both houses, were unwilling to leave well enough alone and engineered what has come to be known as the Midnight Gerrymander.

It happened at the end of the 2003 session, in the middle of a night that some Democrats still remember as one of the worst of their lives.

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” recalls Matthew Moseley, who was an aide to Senate Democrats at the time. He is now putting the finishing touches on a book, “The Midnight Gerrymander”, due out soon. “It was one of the defining moments of my life,” he adds.

“It was pretty awful,” agreed Joan Fitz-Gerald who was a Democrat in the Legislature at the time. “I’ve never felt so vulnerable,” she said about the night that a Republican majority suspended the rules and pushed new maps through in the middle of the night.

She says Colorado was one of a handful of states that Republicans targeted nationally for the creation of GOP-friendly seats. “They thought if they could change just a few seats nationally they could create a permanent majority.”

She and Moseley both say Bush strategist Karl Rove was on the phone with Republican lawmakers through the night, though some of them deny it to this day.

From a Rocky Mountain News editorial of May 8, 2003:

The history of this sorry episode is the following: The 2001 General Assembly failed in its constitutional duty to redraw congressional districts after the 2000 Census gave Colorado a seventh seat. Legislators’ partisan inability to agree on a map meant that Denver District Court Judge John Coughlin picked one so last November’s election could proceed. The one he picked, though largely drawn by Democrats, was a pretty good one. It established three “safe” Republican districts, two in which Democrats are likely to prevail, and a couple that are competitive – based upon voter registrations. That’s about as much competition as can be expected in a state in which one party has a wide registration edge.

Those who see merit in competitive districts, as we do, should oppose any redrawing of the boundaries.

GOP lawmakers see matters differently, since redrawing boundaries could produce five safe Republican seats rather than three. Hence the drama at the Capitol (still under way as we wrote this): With this year’s General Assembly no longer paralyzed by split party control, Republicans decided to draw the congressional map after all.

From a Rocky Mountain News article published the same day:

“It was all a charade,” said (Joan) Fitz-Gerald, who complained on the final day that it was a plot engineered, in part, by the White House and Karl Rove, President Bush’s top behind-the-scenes man. “And we violated our own state constitution in the process.”

Not so, argued (state) Sen. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, whose map caused the furor. He said the legislature was only doing its duty – replacing a court-ordered map crafted when a Senate controlled by Democrats and a House controlled by Republicans couldn’t reach accord in the 2002 session.

“What we’re doing right now is buying us a big expensive lawsuit,” said Senate Assistant Minority Leader Ken Gordon, D-Denver, as the bill was debated on the floor.

He was right, of course. No sooner had Republicans pushed new maps through than Gov. Bill Owens signed the legislation to change the court-ordered maps to something more palatable to Republicans. This over the objections of state Attorney General Ken Salazar who let the governor and the Legislature know that he would not defend their actions in court.

Democrats immediately filed suit. Republicans authorized the state to hire private counsel to defend the Republican maps. The case went all the way to The United States Supreme Court, where hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees later, the original court drawn maps were upheld and the Republican gerrymander was tossed out.

From the Rocky Mountain News, May 10, 2003:

Ninety minutes after the governor signed into law a contentious new congressional redistricting plan Friday, Democrats retaliated by asking the courts to declare it unconstitutional.

In a lawsuit filed at 4:35 p.m. in Denver District Court, Democrats allege that the plan, which strengthens Republican voting margins in at least two of seven state districts, violates the Colorado Constitution, the Colorado Open Meetings Law, First Amendment guarantees and “numerous Colorado legislative rules and regulations.”

We know how poorly the gerrymander and subsequent court battle turned out for Republicans. Virtually every major newspaper in the state editorialized against the GOP power grab.

All of this was going on at a time when the state budget was in roughly the same shape it is in today–charged with making up huge shortfalls every year.

Here, the Rocky Mountain News of December 2, 2003 reports on the court case:

The Colorado Supreme Court handed Democrats a major political victory with potential national overtones Monday by striking down a Republican-drawn congressional map.

GOP lawmakers violated the state constitution in May when they replaced a map approved last year by the courts with one of their own, the state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 decision.

“The state constitution limits redistricting to once per census, and nothing in state or federal law negates this limitation,” said Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey in writing the majority opinion.

“Having failed to redistrict when it should have, the General Assembly has lost its chance to redistrict until after the 2010 federal census.”

The Rocky reported that outside legal expenses to that point were about $600,000. Additionally, of course, were expenses incurred by the Attorney General’s office and numerous other state agencies.

But, they weren’t done. Driven by what they saw as the rightness of their cause, Colorado Republicans pressed on all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously for the original court drawn districts and against the Republican re-do.

That outcome was preordained by decades of legal precedent, going back to similar cases in the 1930s and on into the 1990s. For anyone to think this would be the case that got a different result is mind boggling, especially given the money invested.

As the Denver Post’s Bob Ewegen wrote in 2006, “They can’t be thinking.”

Well, according to Senate President at the time John Andrews, they were thinking plenty. In a column he published in the Rocky on June 9, 2003, he wrote this:

What kind of Congress do you want? That’s the question behind all the noise in recent weeks about boundary lines between Colorado’s seven congressional districts.

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I want the kind of Congress that keeps our taxes down, respects our values as Westerners, and stands up for America against our enemies. I don’t want a Congress that agrees with the New York liberals on bigger government and with the Hollywood left on blaming America.

Most Coloradans feel the same. People in our state have generally liked Congress’ decision-making a lot better in the past eight years, with the heartland Republicans in charge, than they did in the previous 40 years with the tax-and-spend Democrats in charge. It’s been a welcome change.

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There are only two kinds of Congress to choose from – one where Scott McInnis and other Republicans hold the majority, or one where Diana DeGette and other Democrats do. Nonpartisanship is not an option. And that’s why SB 352 is the right map for Colorado’s congressional delegation in this decade.

As is usually the case with redistricting, it was not then about fair lines or communities of interest. It was about engineering the lines to give one side an advantage, to allow one side to decide what kind of congress we’ll have.

While there are obvious lessons to be drawn from the last go-around, it is hard to tell at this point how things will shake out this year.

Democrats and Republicans held hearings on dueling redistricting maps at the Capitol Thursday while party leadership negotiated with the governor to find a solution to partisan gridlock.

House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, and Sen. President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, met with Gov. John Hickenlooper to discuss a possible compromise on Thursday. While it is unclear what occurred during those discussions, Hickenlooper has previously said that creating competitive districts is the purpose for redistricting. Still, despite a possible compromise, testimony continued in packed hearings for both a Senate sponsored Democratic map and a House sponsored Republican map.

With testimony relatively the same in both hearings, with rural and often Republican communities predominantly testifying in favor of the Republican plan, it appeared clear that neither side planned to make any serious amendments to their maps during the committee hearings. After hours of debate, both Democrats and Republicans passed their own bills.

“The reason so many people and organizations are supporting our map is because we listened and have taken into account what they wanted in a redistricting map and kept communities whole,” Rep. David Balmer, R-Centennial, said.

Some Democratic observers said the predominance of those favoring the Republican plan was the result of Republican Party emails sent out to its members.

While most West Slope politicians and residents testified in favor of the Republican map, many had not yet seen the newest iteration of the Democratic plan. The map which reunifies the Western Slope and returned Grand Junction into its fold appeased many of those residents. However, their complaints were quickly replaced by those of Douglas and Fremont counties and the southeastern corner of the state who were included in the 2nd CD and 5th CD respectively.

Fremont county resident Richard Elsner said they had nothing in common with Boulder nor did their working class residents feel that they should be represented by someone who was also representing the ski resorts.

Others testified in the Senate hearing that by placing the Lower Arkansas River Valley in the same congressional district as Colorado Springs, currently represented by U.S Rep. Doug Lamborn, long-fought battles over natural resources would no longer be overseen by a single representative for the district. They area is currently in district four, represented by U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner.

Sen. Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, stressed the point with Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, who was sponsoring the bills in committee. Grantham told Heath he was putting two interests which have been at loggerheads with each other under the same umbrella, asking him if he realized that was the case.

“Of course,” Heath responded, but said that there were no perfect districts where all interests could have their own special representation.

Democrats stepped up to testify on the bill and said that they were greatly in favor of more competitive districts in Colorado, an element that supporters of the Republican maps and Republicans themselves said were non-issues for them in the redrawing of district lines.

“I believe that Coloradans across the state deserve a redistricting map across the state that is reflective of the competitive nature of our electorate,” Colorado Democratic Party Executive Director Alec Garnett said. “The Balmer map was obviously drawn in a backroom by a partisan surgeon who ever so slightly cut out neighborhoods from one district to steal the seat from Democrats.”

The Republican map proposal gives Republicans four safe seats and Democrats the 1st CD and the 2nd CD. The Democratic map gives only one safe district to each party, and creates five relatively competitive districts with most of those leaning in favor of Republicans.

While Democrats in the House moved to amend the Republican bill and replace it with the Senate version in the House committee, that notion fell flat. Both parties passed their own bills which will now go to the floor of their respective chambers for full consideration.

The battle of the maps continues under the Capitol dome as Democrats released a new redistricting map today that they said is a compromise that is still open to change as the deadline quickly approaches for the General Assembly to provide the state with new lines of congressional representation.

A new redistricting map released by the Democrats today created competitive districts and leaves the Western slope to be legislated by one congressional Representative, a huge change from their past map that cut the area in two. Republican Speaker of the House Frank McNulty said the map was an improvement but would not bring Republicans to the table.

“This is a state that is made up of approximately one third Democrats, one third Republicans and one third unaffiliated voters,” Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, said in the press conference. “We argue that all parties should be considered and we have created a map that has one Democratic, one Republican and five competitive districts.”

Democrats issued their map to replace one introduced last week after what they said were compromises taking place up till just before Republicans released their House map on Tuesday. They said their new map represents a number of Republican ideas to keep communities of interest whole whenever possible while ensuring competitive districts.

Video of the Democratic news conference here:

“Democrats have been working with Republicans on a compromise map that is responsive to the issues raised by the public while creating and maintaining competitive districts,” Heath said.

The Democratic map bears similarities to a map introduced yesterday by Republicans, but cuts the Eastern Plains in two parts–a feature McNulty said was unacceptable. He said that the maps sold out the South East portion of the state by giving the area to the 5th congressional district. The area is currently Represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner and, under the Democratic map, would be represented by Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn.

“I am interested to see where my colleagues stand on this map. First [Democrats] sold out Pueblo, now that they have put the 3rd CD back together, they have sold out the lower Arkansas Valley,” McNulty said upon seeing the new maps.

The Democratic map uses an expansion of CD 2 to create competitive districts. It keeps the Western Slope in the 3rd CD by expanding CD 2, which includes Boulder County south to Fremont County, while keeping Grand Junction in the Western Slope. In addition, the new map splits the Eastern Plains in two parts but gives the southern portion of the plains, currently in the 4th CD, to the 5th CD, which includes Colorado Springs. Pueblo would remain in the 3rd CD.

The Democratic map appears to give Republicans the advantage in most congressional districts. Heath said, Republicans were likely to win in five of the seven districts under the Republican map, and said Democrats were not willing to create districts that gave people “seats for life.”

CD 1 and CD 5 would remain Republican strongholds as they did in the Republican map issued yesterday. However, in districts 2, 3, 4,  6, and 7, there are single digit differences in voter registration between Democrats and Republicans, with considerable Republican leads in 3 of those 5 competitive districts. Unaffiliated voters also factor in to the make-up of the maps and show controlling margins in CD 2, 4, 6 and 7, though in some cases that lead is slight.

Democrats acquiesced to Republican and Western Slope voices that said they were unwilling to split the Western Slope. In addition, Democrats gave Republicans a whole Larimer county and placed Greenwood Village and Arapahoe County in the 6th CD, a move that splits the city of Aurora.

Both Republicans and Democrats said they were following state protocol when it came to redrawing the district maps. However, McNulty said that he was waiting until Democrats came with a map that was fair for Colorado, a statement that he qualified by explaining, “This is all a value judgment.”

Much like in the budgeting process, discussions and negotiations continue to go on behind closed doors both in the Capitol and around the state while lawmakers try to work out their final lines in the sand.

Both bills will be heard tomorrow in committee. Democrats announced their bill would be heard at 3 p.m. to allow those testifying at the Republican bill, scheduled at 2 p.m., to testify on both maps.