Maryland Redistricting Panel Approves New Congressional Map

The Maryland Redistricting Commission voted Tuesday to recommend new borders for congressional districts in the state, the latest Democratic state to retaliate against partisan maps drawn by Republicans in several other states across the country.

Maryland is currently split into eight congressional districts represented by seven Democrats. The proposed map by the commission would likely ensure a full Democratic sweep across the state.

“The vote by Maryland’s redistricting committee is another important step toward ensuring a fair national congressional map ahead of the midterm election,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement. “Arrogant and corrupt Republicans started this battle. Democrats will end it. We will ensure that there is a free and fair midterm election in November.”

U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, the chair of the redistricting panel, also celebrated the move in a statement Tuesday night, saying that the state “has a responsibility to lead with urgency” due to similar Republican efforts to redraw maps in their party’s favor across the country.

Not all of the commission’s Democrats are on board, however. Senate President Bill Ferguson has spoken out against the commission and its new congressional map, calling it “a flawed process has delivered a flawed product.”

“The Governor’s Commission recommended a map today that is objectively unconstitutional and jeopardizes Maryland’s existing map,” Ferguson said Tuesday in a statement. “Further, this map fails the governor’s own test. It breaks apart more neighborhoods and communities than our existing map, and it fails the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote.”

Some state-level Republicans have echoed Ferguson’s concerns about a potential for all of the state’s congressional districts to lean Democratic. House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, in a statement after the vote, said the commission is the result of “D.C. partisan politics and the desires of the Democratic National Committee.”

“This commission was merely a drawn-out political sham with a predetermined outcome: to rid Maryland of any Republican representation in Congress and disenfranchise voters in Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore,” Buckel said. “Nothing drives this home more than their absurd end product.”

Maryland’s push for a new map follows the Virginia legislature’s new constitutional amendment, which paves the way for a special election in which voters will decide whether to approve new congressional maps favoring Democrats ahead of the midterms.

The Maryland redistricting commission’s map will next go before the state’s General Assembly, and legislation proposing the new map would need to pass both houses for the new lines to go into effect.