The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What's next in redistricting debate
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed two state electoral maps that were challenged as excessively partisan to remain in place for now, declining to rule on the bigger issue of whether to put limits on redistricting for political gain.
The court’s action
The court issued two unanimous rulings in partisan redistricting cases from Wisconsin and Maryland that decided very little. Rather than endorse limits or rule them out altogether, the court decided each case on procedural grounds.
The result
The rulings ensured that any resolution by the nation’s high court would not come before this year’s midterm elections. Proceedings in both the Maryland and Wisconsin cases
will continue in lower courts. Meanwhile, the justices could decide by the end of June whether to take up a new case from North Carolina.
Effect on Georgia
Separate lawsuits contesting Georgia’s districts are pending. In one case, a panel of federal
judges found “compelling” evidence that race dominated the process of redrawing legislative districts in 2015, but the plain- tiffs couldn’t refute testimony that decisions were based on partisanship rather than race. The judges declined to grant an injunction, and the case is still ongoing. Another lawsuit filed last week in Georgia
and two other Southern states, based on the Voting Rights
Act, argues that congressional districts disempower African-American voters.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a decision on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, ruling against the challengers of a Republican-drawn map in Wisconsin and a Democratic redistricting in Maryland.
The decisions in the separate cases once again puts off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional.
It was a technical resolution of what had seemed to hold the promise of being a landmark decision about whether extreme efforts to give one party advantage over another were unconstitutional.
While the court routinely polices the drawing of electoral maps to combat racial gerrymandering, it has never found that partisan efforts went too far. It has never settled on a test that judges could use to determine how much politics was too much.
There is a pending challenge to North Carolina’s redistricting efforts that could provide another case for the justices to consider the issue.
In the Wisconsin case, the court said that the challenges must be brought district by district, with voters in each proving that their rights had been violated. The challengers asked the court to consider the state map as a whole.
The Maryland case was
‘Today’s decision is yet another delay in providing voters with the power they deserve in our democracy.’ Chris Carson president of the League of Women Voters of the United States
still at a preliminary stage, and the court in an unsigned opinion said the lower court had not been wrong when it decided not to make the state redraw the maps in time for the 2018 election.
“Today’s decision is yet another delay in providing voters with the power they deserve in our democracy,” said Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States. “Partisan gerrymandering is distorting and undermining our representative democracy, giving politicians the power to choose their voters, instead of giving voters the power to choose their politicians. We are disappointed that the Court failed to set a standard when it comes to partisan gerrymandering.”
Maryland Democratic leaders
set out in 2011 to redraw the state’s congressional districts to boost the likelihood that the party’s 6-to-2 edge in the delegation became 7 to 1.
Democratic former governor Martin O’Malley was frank about the effort in a deposition in the case.
“As the elected governor, I did my duty within the metes and bounds” of Maryland law that set up redistricting as a partisan exercise, O’Malley said. He added that if the reconfigured district “would be more likely to elect a Democrat than a Republican, yes, this was clearly my intent.”
O’Malley also now says he believes redistricting should be done by an independent commission rather than by legislators.
The Democrats targeted longtime Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who had been reelected in 2010 by a 28-percentage-point margin, but lost to a Democrat in the redrawn district in 2012 by 21 points.