High court takes up second dispute over gerrymanders
Md. Democrats remapped to add district, GOP says.
The Supreme Court has already heard a major case about political line-drawing that has the potential to reshape American politics. Now, before even deciding that one, the court is taking up another similar case.
The arguments justices will hear Wednesday in the second case, a Republican challenge to a Democratic-leaning congressional district in Maryland, could offer fresh clues to what they are thinking about partisan gerrymandering, an increasingly hot topic before courts.
Decisions in the Maryland case and the earlier one from Wisconsin are expected by late June.
The arguments come nearly six months after the court heard a dispute over Wisconsin legislative districts that Democrats claim were drawn to maximize Republican control in a state that is closely divided between the parties.
The Supreme Court has never thrown out electoral districts on partisan grounds and it’s not clear the justices will do so now. But supporters of limits on partisanship in redistricting are encouraged that the justices are considering two cases.
“In taking these two cases, the Supreme Court wants to say something about partisan gerrymandering. It’s clear the Supreme Court is not walking away from the issue,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice.
The justices’ involvement in partisan redistricting reflects a period of unusual activity in the courts on this topic. Over the past 16 months, courts struck down political districting plans drawn by Republicans in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Federal judges threw out a state legislative map in Wisconsin and a congressional plan in North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court invalidated the state’s congressional districts and replaced them with a courtdrawn plan.
When the Supreme Court heard Wisconsin’s appeal, the court appeared to be split along familiar lines. Four liberal justices seemed inclined to strike down the legislative map and four conservatives appeared more favorable to it. That left Justice Anthony Kennedy seemingly in control of the outcome.
A relatively quick resolution of the case also appeared likely, based on the way the court handled the case. A lower court had earlier struck down the districts and ordered new ones drawn. The justices blocked the drawing of a new map last summer, but set the case for arguments in the first week of its new term in October.
Then in December, the court said it would hear the case about Maryland’s 6th congressional district, but provided no further explanation about why it was adding a second redistricting case.
Democrats who controlled redistricting in Maryland in 2011 made a conscious decision to try to increase the party’s control of congressional districts from 6-2 to 7-1, said Michael Kimberly, the lawyer representing the Republican challengers.
They took a district that had been centered in rural, Republican-leaning northwestern Maryland, where a longtime Republican incumbent won by 28 percentage points in 2010 and turned it into a district that took in some Democratic Washington, D.C., suburbs and elected a Democrat who won by 21 percentage points in 2012.
The change violated the First Amendment rights of the Republican voters, Kimberly said.