Justices seem uncertain on redistricting issue
WASHINGTON — Dealing with an issue that could affect elections across the country, Supreme Court justices wrestled Wednesday with how far states may go to craft electoral districts that give the majority party a huge political advantage.
But even as they heard their second case on partisan redistricting in six months, the justices expressed uncertainty about the best way to deal with a problem that several said would get worse without the court’s intervention.
The arguments the court heard Wednesday were over an appeal by Republican voters in Maryland who object to a congressional district that Democrats drew to elect a candidate of their own. The Maryland case is a companion to one from Wisconsin in which Democrats complain about Ashley Oleson, with the League of Women Voters of Maryland, carries signs representing that state’s congressional districts as nonpartisan groups protest gerrymandering Wednesday in front of the Supreme Court.
a Republican-drawn map of legislative districts. That case was argued in October and remains undecided.
Justice Stephen Breyer suggested the court could add in yet a third case involving North Carolina’s congressional districts and set another round of arguments to deal with all three states.
His comment is an
indication that the justices haven’t yet figured out the Wisconsin case. More importantly, it suggests that Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose vote almost certainly controls the outcome, has reservations about using the Wisconsin case for the court’s first-ever ruling on whether districting plans that entrench one party’s control of a legislature or congressional delegation can violate the constitutional rights of the other party’s voters.
The Maryland lawsuit offers the court a morelimited approach to dealing with the issue because it involves just one district that flipped from Republican to Democratic control after the 2011 round of redistricting.
There was broad agreement that the Republican voters who sued presented what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “pretty damning” evidence that the Democrats who controlled the state government wanted to increase the Democrats’ edge in the congressional from 6-2 to 7-1.
If the court doesn’t confront the big issues now, Breyer said, sophisticated map-makers using increasingly powerful technology will create more effective partisan maps after the 2020 census.