Apr 19, 2018 3 min read

When political maps are drawn to help a candidate or party hold power, it’s known as gerrymandering. It should now be called “Daryl-mandering” in Pennsylvania.

Daryl Metcalfe, the controversial Republican state legislator from Cranberry, last week killed a bipartisan proposal that would have changed the way Pennsylvania’s political districts are drawn.

House Bill 722 would have taken the power from the politicians, who currently draw their own political maps, and instead given it to an independent commission of citizens. The independent process hopefully would have produced fairer maps that moved Pennsylvania away from its culture of gerrymandering that tends to protect parties over the people’s will.

The bill had garnered more than 100 sponsors, showing there was broad support for the change. In Pennsylvania’s bloated Legislature, it’s hard to find 100 members who agree on anything nowadays.

Instead, Metcalfe and his fellow Republicans on the House’s State Government Committee took a flamethrower to the bill, rewriting it to give the majority party in the Legislature more power in drawing the maps. Metcalfe had been holding HB 722 hostage for weeks as the committee’s chairman before pulling the stunt to effectively kill the bill.

“There is no greater citizens’ commission than the General Assembly in this state,” Metcalfe said during the hearing in which all 15 Republicans on the committee voted in support of the major changes while the 11 Democrats dissented.

It’s unlikely the redrawn rules have a chance in the Senate, where a similar bill is being considered.

This all comes on the heels of the state Supreme Court throwing out the old congressional district maps that gave Republicans an unfair advantage that essentially decided elections before a single ballot was ever cast. In response, state Republicans have floated the idea of impeaching four Democratic justices who overruled the old map and created a new one to be used this year.

What a bunch of malarkey. If anyone should go, it’s Metcalfe and his legislative conspirators.

This maneuver, of course, comes just months after the state House scrapped a plan to drastically reduce the number of its members after their colleagues in the state Senate wouldn’t swallow their own poison pill to trim some of the legislative fat. But that was done under the guise that a process to end gerrymandering should be attached to the bill.

Now, we have neither.

But what we do have soon is a May 15 primary. And less than six months after that, there’s a general election.

The rising tide of voter discontent has given way to many retirements and new candidates. They all must go, especially Metcalfe.

The state Legislature – with its unwieldy 203 representatives and 50 senators pulling in full-time paychecks – can’t get out of its own way. It’s now up to the voters to show them the door.

Just like the 2005 midnight payraise sent many longtime incumbents scrambling to the exits, the voters must now show the current crop of legislators the door in this year’s elections.

Only after there’s a clean slate of leaders will the citizens of Pennsylvania be able to reduce the size of the Legislature and find a fair way to draw the state’s political maps.

Voters must clean House. The days of “Daryl-mandering” should be coming to an end.