High court will evaluate Maryland redistricting
Democratic leaders redrew boundaries to benefit candidates
Maryland Democratic leaders set out in 2011 to redraw the state’s congressional districts to boost the likelihood that the party’s 6-to-2 edge in the delegation became 7 to 1, the state’s Democratic former governor Martin O’Malley recalled last year. It was nothing personal.
“I came to really like and respect and in many ways admire” the Democrats’ unlucky target, Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who had represented Maryland’s 6th Congressional District since 1993, O’Malley said.
But business is business, and this business was politics.
Hundreds of thousands of voters were shifted, and Bartlett, who had been re-elected in 2010 by a 28 percentage point margin, lost to a Democrat in 2012 by 21 points.
O’Malley said last spring in a deposition that if the reconfigured district “would be more likely to elect a Democrat than a Republican, yes, this was clearly my intent.”
O’Malley’s frank admission is at the heart of what is becoming an unprecedented look at partisan gerrymandering by the Supreme Court. The justices on Wednesday will hear the challenge to Maryland’s Democratic decision-making, after last fall examining — but not yet deciding — a lawsuit on Republican efforts in Wisconsin.
The cases hold the prospect that the court is on the brink of a historic change in the way elections are conducted in the United States.
If O’Malley’s words sound like a confession, claiming partisan gerrymandering for years has actually been a defense. The justices regularly police state legislators who overly rely on voters’ race when drawing electoral districts, but the court has never thrown out a state’s map because it was drawn to help one political party over another.
Some justices have considered that a perk of power that the courts had no role in overseeing.
But the political landscape has changed, and the legal one might as well. “There’s a revolution underway,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause.
Voters across the country are organizing to take redistricting power away from politicians and put it in the hands of nonpartisan decision-makers - although many states, including Maryland, don’t allow such changes without legislative approval.
The other option is litigation, and courts in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have thrown out maps where the partisan line-drawing was judged extreme.
In Pennsylvania’s case, the state Supreme Court ordered a new map for this fall’s election that levels the playing ground for congressional candidates.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned down pleas from Republican lawmakers to get involved.