Pennsylvania justices toss congressional boundaries

Decision gives victory to Dems, leaves little time to redraw districts

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state’s widely criticized congressional map Monday, granting a major victory to Democrats who alleged the 18 districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to benefit Republicans and setting off a scramble to draw a new map.

In the Democratic-controlled court’s decision, the majority said the boundaries “clearly, plainly and palpably” violate the state’s constitution and blocked the boundaries from remaining in effect for the 2018 elections with just weeks until dozens of people file paperwork to run for Congress.

The justices gave the Republicancontrolled Legislature until Feb. 9 to pass a replacement and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf until Feb. 15 to submit it to the court. Otherwise, the justices said they will adopt a plan in an effort to keep the May 15 primary election on track.

The decision comes amid a national tide of gerrymandering cases, including some that have reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The defendants — top Republican lawmakers — said they would ask the U.S. Supreme Court this week to step in and put the decision on hold. The state court’s decision lacks clarity and precedent and would introduce chaos into the state’s congressional races, they said.

The decision has immediate implications for the 2018 election, meaning that 14 sitting members of Congress and dozens more people are planning to run in districts they may no longer live in. The deadline to file paperwork to run in primaries is March 6.

It also has implications for GOP control of Congress, since only Texas, California and Florida send more Republicans to the U.S. House than Pennsylvania.

Republicans who controlled Pennsylvania’s Legislature and governor’s office following the 2010 census broke decades of geographical precedent when redrawing the map, producing contorted shapes, including one dubbed “Goofy kicking Donald Duck.”

They shifted whole counties and cities into different districts in an effort to protect a Republican advantage in the congressional delegation. They succeeded, as Republicans in the delegation grew from 12 to 13, even as Pennsylvania lost a seat to account for the state’s relatively slow population growth.

The Pennsylvania court’s sixparagraph order did not lay out the rationale for striking down the 2011 congressional map or which provisions of the constitution the justices believed it violated.

The decision came as the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether redistricting can be so partisan that it violates the U.S. Constitution, in cases from Maryland and Wisconsin. The court also last week put on hold a lower court order in a gerrymandering case from North Carolina that gave lawmakers two weeks to redraw the state’s congressional districts.