Dems face tough legal environment on redistricting
After New York state's top court this week crushed Democratic hopes of coming out ahead in this decade's redistricting cycle, the party faces an increasingly precarious legal environment in the hyper-partisan battle over drawing legislative lines.
New York's Court of Appeals on Wednesday overturned a map that Democrats muscled through the state legislature there, deciding that a nonpartisan expert will instead draw the lines for the state's 26 congressional districts. It was at least the fifth time this cycle a state court has ruled that maps drawn by its state legislature were too partisan, with a Democratic map in Maryland also falling and Republican-drawn ones in Kansas, North Carolina and Ohio being tossed out as well.
Still, Republicans are favored to win state Supreme Court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November that'd enable those GOP-controlled legislatures to implement more partisan maps before 2024. In contrast, the 4-3 New York decision came from a court appointed entirely by Democrats, a party that now finds itself bound to a bipartisan process written into the state's constitution.
“Democratic judges are not really as inclined to excuse extreme partisan gerrymandering as Republican ones are,” said Lakshya Jain, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley who writes on redistricting at the website Split Ticket. “Democrats for a long time have been pushing for redistricting reform and anti-gerrymandering legislation,” Jain noted, and that seeps into their judges' preferences.
The biggest test of this potential legal asymmetry comes in Florida, where Democrats and civil rights groups are challenging a congressional map that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through the GOPcontrolled legislature there. Legislators had initially balked at the map, which aggressively favors their party, because it dismantles two plurality-Black districts in possible violation of the state's Fair Districts Amendment, which requires lawmakers to draw districts that let racial and linguistic minorities pick their chosen representatives.