Pa. congressional district map awaits court ruling

HARRISBURG » A request to stop Pennsylvania elections officials from using a map of the state’s congressional districts produced by the state Supreme Court last month was in the hands of a threejudge federal panel Friday, at the same time a similar effort was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, eight Republican congressmen and two senior GOP state senators, argued that the majority Democrats on the state Supreme Court overstepped their authority as they declared a 2011 map an unconstitutional gerrymander and imposed their own district boundaries.

But the defendants — two senior elections officials under Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and 18 Democratic voters who prevailed in state court — defended the legal process that resulted in the new map and predicted that reverting to the former map would create a cascade of other problems, including for mailed-in military and absentee ballots.

Under the 2011 map, drawn up by Republicans and signed by a Republican governor, the GOP has maintained a 13-5 edge in the past three election cycles, a period when Democrats prevailed in 18 of 24 statewide elections. Democrats hope the new map, widely viewed as more favorable to their candidates, may help them retake the U.S. House majority this year.

The two sides disagreed about how much time the state court gave lawmakers to craft a map, with the plaintiffs saying they only had two days after the high court issued a detailed opinion on Feb. 7 to submit something for Wolf to consider. But the defendants said it was actually more like 18 days, starting when the court majority issued an initial two-page order on Jan. 22 that was later fleshed out into the 139-page opinion .

The judges pressed lawyers for the Republican officials about why the GOP-controlled Legislature has done little more to pass a new map than have two leaders provide a proposal to Wolf that he summarily rejected.