Ohio high court rejects GOP congressional map
COLUMBUS, Ohio — As it did earlier this week with state legislative maps, the Ohio Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Republican-drawn congressional map seen as locking in the party’s grip on the state’s delegation to Washington.
Again, Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor proved to be the swing vote in the narrow 4-3 decision. The court ordered the General Assembly to develop within 30 days a new map not hinged on partisan considerations.
Critics of the map, passed solely with Republican votes in November, suggested a potential 12-3 or 13-2 delegation with just two of the 15 districts — in Cleveland and Columbus — seen as safely Democratic while the rest would be strongly Republican or leaning that direction.
Justice Michael Donnelly, a Democrat writing for the majority, wrote that the General Assembly ignored the “clarion call sent by Ohio voters to stop political gerrymandering.”
“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” he wrote. “That perhaps explains how a party that generally musters no more than 55 percent of the statewide popular vote is positioned to reliably win anywhere from 75 percent to 80 percent of the seats in the Ohio congressional delegation. By any rational measure, that skewed result just does not add up.”
Chief Justice O’Connor was the sole Republican in a majority that also included Justices Donnelly, Jennifer Brunner, and Melody Stewart. The three remaining Republican justices — Pat Fischer, Sharon Kennedy, and the governor’s son, Pat DeWine — dissented.
The court struck down the map in its entirety but noted in particular that Hamilton, Cuyahoga, and Summit counties had been “unduly” split.
“Those splits result in noncompact districts that cannot be explained by any neutral factor and serve no purpose other than to confer partisan advantage to the political party that drew the plan,” Justice Donnelly wrote.
The majority found that the problems were systemic to the entire map and could not be fixed by surgically altering a few districts. The newly adopted map was more politically skewed that the one it would have replaced, it said.
Republicans currently hold 12 of Ohio’s 16 congressional seats, a result of a 2011 map widely recognized as gerrymandered. Starting with this year’s election, Ohio is surrendering one of its districts to a faster-growing state.
In defending the latest map, Republicans argued that seven of the 15 districts would be considered competitive. One of them was the new Toledo-based 9th District, currently held by Democratic U. S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, which would have gone from the strongly Democratic “snake on the lake” to leaning Republican. The map pulled the 9th District out of Cleveland and its suburbs to pick up Republicanfriendly, mostly rural counties in the state’s northwest corner.