This Wednesday, the MA House and Senate passed new district lines for Massachusetts’s 9 Congressional districts.
After every decennial US census, states have to redraw the lines for their legislative and Congressional districts. Massachusetts, fortunately, did not lose any Congressional districts, but population shifts meant that some districts — like the 1st Congressional (Richard Neal) and 2nd Congressional (Jim McGovern) — would need to gain more territory and others — like the 7th Congressional (Ayanna Pressley) and 8th Congressional (Stephen Lynch) — would need to lose territory.
The main point of contention with the Congressional maps concerned Fall River and New Bedford. The Drawing Democracy Coalition, which consists of community groups and civil rights advocates from across the Commonwealth (we’re a member), had been advocating for keeping Fall River whole and uniting it with New Bedford in the 9th Congressional district (Bill Keating) given that Fall River and New Bedford share many concerns as gateway cities with large immigrant populations. Moreover, as coastal cities, they share a clear interest with the Cape communities in the 9th.
The Legislature’s map unites Fall River, but does so by putting all of it in the 4th Congressional district (Jake Auchincloss), a strangely designed district that extends from Brookline and Newton down to Fall River.
The House passed the new map 151 to 8. The 8 dissenting votes came from Democrats Christopher Markey (D-Dartmouth) and Alan Silvia (D-Fall River), who heeded the objections from South Coast advocates, and Republicans Donald Berthiaume (R-Spencer), Peter Durant (R-Spencer), Paul Frost (R-Auburn), Joseph McKenna (R-Webster), Lenny Mirra (R-West Newbury), and David Vieira (R-Falmouth). Frost had put forth an amendment about keeping all of Oxford and Webster in the 2nd Congressional district as opposed to moving them to the 1st Congressional, as the new map does, and it’s likely that he and the other Central Mass dissenters voted against the map because of that amendment’s failure.
The debate was far more contentious in the Senate. State Senator Becca Rausch (D-Needham) criticized the map for its scrambling of the lines in MetroWest (“I live in and have the honor of representing parts of Metrowest and this map would slash Metrowest into bits and pieces, divided into five different congressional districts…The Metrowest region has the highest concentration of Brazilian immigrants in the United States.) and separation of Fall River and New Bedford (“We should not divide the two anchor communities of the South Coast. Indeed all of the equity-focused and strong democracy advocates and the strong majority of people who live in Fall River who testified before the committee asked for Fall River and New Bedford to be untied in the ninth district.”) State Senator Marc Pacheco (D-Taunton) echoed such criticism (“It continues to send the message to Southeastern Massachusetts that we in the metropolitan area of Boston, we will continue to do what we want with you and we will use you when we need to but otherwise we will just continue to do what we want when we want to.”)
The vote was much closer in the Senate, with the map only passing 26 to 13, with most of the opposition coming from either stalwart progressives or Southeastern senators.
See all the changes to the map here:
