This redistricting effort focused on several stark demographic facts from the 2000 Census - the state's major cities were losing population to the suburbs, forcing major changes in state legislative districts. The solution, imposed by Republican leaders, wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2001 redistricting focused attention on the steady population shift away from the state's two dominant cities and into outlying suburbs that had been farmland just a decade or two before. Pittsburgh and its immediate urban suburbs lost three state House seats while Philadelphia lost one. Formerly rural Bucks, Lancaster, York and Monroe counties picked up the difference.
Curiously, despite the dramatic shifts in population, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission declined to make any major changes to the State Senate districts, instead opting to make the already oddly shaped districts even more odd. The district representing parts of Bucks County, for example, was stretched without explanation to reach all the way into Easton and the Lehigh Valley. And rather than give the fast-growing western suburbs of Philadelphia a new seat, as they had done with the House map, the commission chose to simply drag the western borders of existing city Senate districts out into the suburbs.
The state party leaders, who make up the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, resisted pressure from several groups, including Latinos in Philadelphia, who wanted a new majority House district in North Philadelphia, where the tightly-concentrated Latino community had grown significantly in recent decades, and officials in the Poconos, who wanted a new district because it the Census showed it to be the fastest-growing part of the state.
The redistricting was done with the usual dose of short-term political calculation. For example, the Commission abruptly decided to split the town of Lower Merion among three House districts - at the stroke of a pen reducing the town's voters to a small minority in each, where they had had a slight majority in one district previously - as part of an elaborate plan to keep the 148th District in Republican hands, since the longtime GOP incumbent was leaving to run for an unexpected State Senate vacancy.
And the three House districts that were eliminated in the Pittsburgh area just happened to be districts represented by Democratic lawmakers who had clashed frequently with their party leadership.
"They terminated me," Rep. David Mayernik of Allegheny County, whose district was eliminated, told the Philadelphia Inquirer the day the plan was released. <"It sends a message: Don't step out of line."
Republican leaders, meanwhile, punished one of their own dissidents by redrawing his district to take away all of his hometown - except the one precinct in which he lived - and shift the bulk of it to a predominantly Democratic area.
"This is about cowards at work," Rep. John Lawless of East Norriton told the Inquirer after he saw his old district eviscerated. "If you vote your constituents, like I did, you get shafted. This is about paying the debts to the [backroom] boys."
Powerful and loyal lawmakers, meanwhile, got rewarded richly. State Rep. John Barley, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, for example, was in danger of defeat after he irritated some in his district when his family sold a large piece of farmland for a new landfill. Opponents had organized to fight him and polls suggested he might be in trouble. Until, that is, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission conveniently carved out the troublesome area of Manor Township and put it in another district. One Barley critic referred to this maneuver as "Barleymandering."
The one thing that was notable about the process in 2001 was the unanimity of the legislative leaders who drew the plan. Republicans saw it as way to cement their control of the legislature, while Democrats though it opened some cracks that could be exploited to regain power. As a result, the five-member Legislative Reapportionment Commission voted for the plan unanimously, the first time it had done so since the Commission was created in 1968.
Many others were unhappy, however, including Latino leaders in Philadelphia, and filed objections with the State Supreme Court. The justices eventually upheld the Commissions plan.
The state's congressional reapportionment proved remarkably controversial, resulting in three separate sets of maps between 2000 and 2004, until winding up before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004.
Republicans used their new-found power in Harrisburg, derived in part from changes in the 1991-92 state redistricting that shifted seats to GOP-friendly suburbs, to push through a congressional redistricting plan in 2002 that gave Republicans an advantage in all 19 congressional districts (down from 21 based on the 2000 Census). Not only did they draw the lines to dilute Democratic power in various districts, they placed several Democratic incumbents together in newly redrawn districts, and moved the home of one longtime incumbent into a new district, separating him from his old voter base.
When the dust settled, Republicans had 12 seats, while Democrats had only 7, despite the fact that the state had slightly more registered Democrats than Republicans (3.7 million to 3.2 million at the time). Before redistricting, Democrats had held 11 of the 21 congressional seats.
Democrats cried foul, saying the Republicans had violated the "equal protection" provisions in the Constitution. In a closely-watched case, however, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it was unable to determine whether there had been an unconstitutional effort to suppress the power of Democratic voters. The decision was a bit muddled, however, since four of the majority justices concluded that the court had no authority to even entertain the question, while the fifth said he did not think this plan violated the Constitution, but he could foresee the possibility that there could be a case where redistricting based on party registration could be considered unconstitutional. That left open the possibility that some future Supreme Court case could find that using political party as the main factor in drawing districts is illegal, which could significantly change the way election districts are drawn nationwide.
Compiled by Committee of 70
Committee of Seventy + 
