From cocktail napkins to the ‘gold standard,’ Iowa plan for redistricting stands test of time

A court decision may have started the ball rolling, but Iowa’s “gold standard” redistricting plan was written on cocktail napkins by barhopping legislators.

Depending on who’s telling the story, it may have happened during a blizzard in Washington or a national legislative conference in Atlanta. However, there’s agreement on the important points – there was drinking involved, and the plan, or at least a plan on how to get it approved by skeptical legislators, was sketched out on cocktail napkins during a discussion that spanned more than one bar and continued in the backseat of a taxi cab.

“You always think a little better if you have a drink or two,” says Lowell Junkins, who was the Senate Democratic leader in the early 1980s.

He’s the lone surviving member of the leadership quartet from that time. The others were House Democratic and Republican leaders Don Avenson of Oelwein and Del Stromer of Garner, respectively, and Senate GOP Leader Cal Hultman of Red Oak.

Junkins recalls that the four started the evening together. Stromer knew the plan would be a hard sell in his caucus and left the others to work it out. Avenson said he would be amenable to whatever Hultman and Junkins agreed on and left them to work on the details.

“So Cal and I sat down with some napkins and said, ‘How do we solve this complicated situation?’” Junkins says.

The situation was that in Iowa, as in most of the country, redistricting, the process of drawing political boundaries, was handled by legislators – politicians who had a vested interest in how and where those lines were drawn. For many years, each county had a state representative and every two counties had a state senator. Polk and Linn, the most populous counties, each had their own senator, explained Larry Murphy of Oelwein, who served in the House and Senate in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Rural communities controlled the Legislature,” and that didn’t change as the population started to shift to urban areas, he said at a celebration of 50 years of nonpartisan redistricting hosted by the Linn County Phoenix Club, a Democratic fundraising group.

Former Gazette political reporter Frank Nye called it a “scheme to give cows more votes than people,” recalled Bob Rush, a Cedar Rapids attorney who served in the Senate from 1977-92.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court established the “one person, one vote” standard to guarantee voters equal protection. In 1968, the Iowa Constitution was amended to require legislative districts to have equal population.

That didn’t resolve the issue, however, and the maps legislators drew were challenged in court, Rush said. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled the maps were unconstitutional and ultimately drew new boundaries.

Murphy observes 2021 as the golden anniversary of the gold-standard redistricting process because 1971 was when the court’s plan took effect. Rush and Anamosa attorney Andy McKean, who also served in the House and Senate, prefer to call 1981 the starting date for the gold standard. That was the first time the redistricting process approved by lawmakers was used.

The former lawmakers agree the current plan of having the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency draw congressional and legislative districts could not get approved today.

“The Legislature has changed dramatically,” said McKean, who served nonconsecutive terms in the 1970s, 1980s and 2000s. In the 1970s, “it was much less partisan” with Gov. Bob Ray and other moderate Republicans willing to work across party lines.

“Bob Ray was really the champion of the commission,” Junkins said recently. He created the environment for legislative leaders to work within their respective caucuses to win support for the plan.

Rush filed a bill calling for a nonpartisan process after he was elected in 1976. Democrats had a two-vote margin in the Senate and his bill never saw daylight. In 1978, the Democrats lost their majority “and I thought my bill was dead.”

Instead, it became Ray’s bill and eventually it was approved with bipartisan support.

“If there had been the kind of partisan leadership that you see out there today, it would have been impossible,” Junkins said. “I've got to give former Governor Ray a lot of credit for standing up against some really tough political winds to do what was right for the state.”

If Ray was the champion, Senate GOP Leader Hultman was the “patron saint,” Murphy said. The GOP controlled the House, Senate and governor’s office, so it could have done whatever it wanted. “But he insisted nothing would pass but this plan.”

That didn’t mean everyone liked it, McKean recalled. “People in the Republican caucus were bouncing off the walls. ‘Why would we give away control?’ they asked leaders.”

Republicans did lose control, “but there was a large enough group of people who said it was the right thing to do,” McKean said.

To Junkins, the fact that control of the Legislature has gone back and forth between the parties – including both parties enjoying trifectas during the past five decades – is a sign that the process works.

The redistricting process, which occurs every 10 years following the census, creates “churn” in the Legislature, Murphy said.

“You really don’t need term limits because of that turnover,” added McKean.

If there’s a downside to being the gold standard, Murphy said, it’s that Iowa has become a target for partisan groups that see it as an obstacle to getting and holding control of the Legislature.

Looking back on it, Junkins, who left the Legislature in 1985 to mount an unsuccessful campaign for governor, said he and the other legislative leaders probably didn’t realize the value of what they were doing or the impact it would have.

“It was probably even wiser than we thought at the moment,” Junkins said. “I'm not sure that we had completely thought through how important this commission was. But at that point, it was clear that the commission was going to be better than having a lot of legislators writing these plans.”

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