By Josh Kurtz —

For politicians, it’s more anxiously anticipated than Christmas — or even Election Day — because it only happens once a decade.

We’re talking, of course, about redistricting, the obscure but highly charged and terribly important process of drawing new boundaries for legislative and Congressional districts. Next year is 2010, which means the federal government will be taking its decennial census. A year later, Maryland leaders will consider the census data and start to make new maps. In 2012, proposals will be voted on in the Legislature, and whatever is approved — whether by lawmakers or by the courts — will be used in state elections beginning that year.

Nothing breeds Democratic unity in Annapolis like redistricting — at least before the lines are drawn. Think back to the 1998 elections, when Democrats who hated then-Gov. Parris Glendening (D) — and many of them did — swallowed hard because they feared the idea that his Republican opponent, Ellen Sauerbrey, could have a hand in redrawing the lines following the 2000 census.

Glendening beat Sauerbrey, and the 2002 redistricting process, dominated by Democrats, yielded two Democratic pick-ups of Congressional seats in Maryland, even though 2002 was a great year for Republicans in the rest of the country. (Glendening’s legislative map wound up being challenged in court, and even though the court made some dramatic changes, it probably didn’t affect the partisan make-up of the Legislature very much.) Now that Democrats possess a 7-1 edge in the Congressional delegation, it will be interesting to see what kind of pain they try to inflict on Republicans this time around.

Think it’s way too early to be worrying about this sort of thing? Guess again. In Washington, the national political parties are already putting together in-house operations to monitor — and influence, where possible — redistricting in all 50 states. And there’s a whiff of the redistricting debates to come in many of the recent political developments across the country.

When popular Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) announced last month that he would run for the U.S. Senate in 2010 instead of seeking re-election, Senate Republicans cheered. The GOP is now almost certain to hold on to an open Senate seat in the Sunshine State. But across the Capitol in the House of Representatives — not to mention back home in Florida — Republicans were a lot less happy. The GOP will have to fight hard to hold on to the governor’s chair, and if a Democrat is elected governor next year, the Democrats will have far more say in the Florida redistricting process. These kind of political calculations are being made across the country every day.

Regardless of what the political climate looks like following the 2010 Census, Democrats will have a distinct national advantage in one important way. With Barack Obama as president, they will control the Justice Department, giving them significant jurisdiction over any federal court cases that come up on redistricting. It will be the first time a Democrat is in the White House and controlling the Justice Department in a redistricting year since JFK was president.

And who will have a very important say over the whole process? Marylander Tom Perez, the outgoing secretary at the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, who is Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. As if we needed more proof that we have to pay attention to this guy.

July/August print edition. Posted July 6, 2009.