Another slap in the face to Pa. voters

Ever wonder why Pennsylvania is sometimes mockingly referred to as the "Land of Giants."

Here's a hint. It often has to do with our elected officials in Harrisburg.

This bloated, expensive, overpaid and under-worked body managed to distinguish itself once again recently.

This time it concerned something that has been much on voters' minds recently.

That would be the redistricting debate.

Clearly, voters in the Commonwealth were looking for meaningful change in what has become a blatantly political act. It got so bad that the state Supreme Court tossed out the last Congressional map drawn up by the Legislature and drew up one of their own.

A push in the Legislature to take the commonsense step of getting politics out of this practice hit a bit of a pothole recently.

Its name is Rep. Daryl Metcalfe. He's the Republican firebrand who chairs the House State Government Committee. That body was about to take up a bill to set up an independent, bipartisan citizen commission that would be entrusted with the job of drawing up fair maps based on the latest census results.

But then Metcalfe got involved.

The result was an amendment that not only takes both citizens and the courts out of the equation, but once again stacks the deck in favor of the Republican majority that currently rules the roost in the state capitol.

Don' think for a moment that this is a partisan blast. We don't doubt for a moment that if Democrats were in control, they would be doing the same thing. It's apparently simply an irresistible political gambit.

It's also a slap in the face to the state's voters.

We talk about it on today's editorial page.