The Supreme Court Will Consider Gerrymandering Again

People rally in front of the Supreme Court on March 26 as the courtroom hears arguments in redistricting cases. The court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question, not one that federal courts can weigh in on. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images hide explanation

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Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

People rally in front of the Supreme Court on March 26 equally the courtroom hears arguments in redistricting cases. The court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question, not 1 that federal courts can weigh in on.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Updated seven:45 p.m. ET

In a v-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Courtroom ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable past federal courts — and that those courts can't guess if farthermost gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Master Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does atomic number 82 to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the courtroom'due south responsibleness to notice a solution.

Now just two years abroad from the redrawing of new districts at the start of the next decade, legislators in states that have control of all levels of governments after the 2020 election may experience emboldened past the ruling, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School.

"We are in Mad Max territory at present; there are no rules," Levitt said. "I recall you'll run across more than legislators in more states [where at that place is unilateral control] taking up the mantle of extreme partisan aggression against people who disagree with them."

The court's ruling came in 2 cases. In Maryland, Democrats who controlled the country legislature drew new lines for congressional districts to eliminate one of the state'due south 2 GOP seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; and in North Carolina, where Republicans controlled the state legislature, they used the same tactics to isolate and limit Democratic power, and maximize their ain.

Levitt emphasized that the issue isn't a partisan 1. While Republicans have benefited almost from the practice in recent years, that'southward mostly due to their success capturing statehouses in the 2010 election.

"This is emphatically not a specifically Republican trouble," Levitt said. "History has shown that both major parties are perfectly willing to rig the balloter rules to benefit their own, and to depict the lines to punish opposing partisans."

Groups on all sides agreed that Th's decision means that state-level victories will decide the future of balloter maps.

"The Supreme Court's decision has made one thing clear: The only way we'll end partisan gerrymandering is by voting Republicans out of power in state legislatures," said Jessica Post, executive managing director the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which focuses on helping Democrats win statehouse races.

Austin Chambers, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, echoed that point, proverb his group would "practise everything we tin to ensure nosotros win the legislative and judicial elections needed for off-white and accurate redistricting."

Kavanaugh changed the court'southward debate

Prior to Justice Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on this issue. He seemed open to limiting partisan redistricting if the courtroom was presented with a "manageable standard." But with Kavanaugh on the court, the search for that standard is over.

"Technology is both a threat and a promise," Kennedy has written in a prior case, noting that with the advent of computer technology, the temptation to leverage partisan advantage would "just grow" — unless constrained past the courts.

That temptation was clear in North Carolina. Although voters in the state are carve up roughly equally between Republicans and Democrats, the Republican-controlled state legislature openly drew congressional commune lines to maximize their partisan advantage.

As Republican David Lewis, the chairman of the state legislature's redistricting commission, put information technology, "I advise we draw the maps to requite an advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do non believe it is possible to describe a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats."

Republicans managed to both maximize their advantage and minimize Democratic power by drawing commune lines to pack as many Democrats as possible into three districts, then bully other potentially Democratic districts in half or thirds, diluting the Democratic vote to create prophylactic Republican districts.

The League of Women Voters, one of the challengers in the case, pointed out that the GOP had even split predominantly Autonomous Greensboro so that one-half of the dorms at historically blackness North Carolina A&T Country University were put in one Republican district, and one-half in another.

Calculation another twist to the Northward Carolina instance is the recent unearthing of difficult drives belonging to Republican redistricting adept Dr. Thomas Hofeller, who drew the original 2016 map for the GOP. This calendar month those challenging the redistricting map filed papers in the lower courts, alleging that Hofeller's own words on his difficult drive demonstrate that Northward Carolina Republicans used deceptive and improper tactics in their redistricting efforts.

In a 2016 case, the Supreme Courtroom struck downward the GOP redistricting map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Those maps were nonetheless used in the 2018 election considering Republican lawmakers told the lower courts that they had not done whatever preparation to redraw the maps and would need considerable time to do so.

The newly discovered Hofeller hard drive, notwithstanding, contains amended Senate and House maps that were almost complete more than than a yr before the 2018 elections, co-ordinate to documents filed by the plaintiffs suing to overturn the maps.

In improver, despite the prohibition on using racial data in redistricting, Dr. Hofeller included "the racial composition of the proposed districts for each and every iteration of his typhoon maps," according to the challengers. They argue that these files point that Due north Carolina Republicans misled the lower courts in society to keep using a map in 2018 that was unconstitutionally gerrymandered forth racial lines.

Republicans deny the charges, dismissing Hofeller's drafts as "play maps" washed on personal time.

There was like bear witness of partisanship in the drawing of Maryland's lines, where former Governor Martin O'Malley testified that the commune in question was fatigued to "create a district where the people would exist more probable to elect a Democrat than a Republican, yep, this was clearly my intent."

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court's four liberals, noted in an impassioned dissent: "Of all times to abandon the Courtroom's duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of authorities. Part of the Court's part in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections." Her phonation trembling, she concluded, "With respect simply deep sadness, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and I dissent."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/731847977/supreme-court-rules-partisan-gerrymandering-is-beyond-the-reach-of-federal-court

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