Justices to get gerrymandering cases
WASHINGTON – The extreme partisanship gripping American politics could be reduced by two landmark cases going to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, and Chief Justice John Roberts looms as the deciding vote.
For the second consecutive year, the high court is considering something it has never done before: declaring as unconstitutional election maps drawn blatantly by state legislators to gain partisan advantage.
On the chopping block will be congressional districts set by North Carolina Republicans and Maryland Democrats to give their candidates an overwhelming advantage during the past decade.
What’s at stake is the way state and congressional election districts are redrawn once every decade in most states – a system dominated by political selfinterest that grows more intense every time the Supreme Court declines to tame it. If the justices fail to act, election districts drawn after the 2020 census could be even more extreme, leading to more lopsided elections and more ideological gridlock in Congress.
The court has declined to intervene five times before – most recently last year, when the justices refused to decide challenges in Wisconsin and Maryland. Opponents of partisan gerrymandering hope the sixth time will be the charm, but the court’s conservative majority stands in the way. Or does it?
Since the high court took on a more contentious political air during last fall’s confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts has sided with liberal justices in several cases that would have drawn attention to the court’s 5-4 divide between conservatives and liberals. Those included abortion-related cases from Louisiana and Kansas, religious liberty cases from California and New Jersey, and death penalty cases from Texas and Alabama.
None of those is as consequential as the gerrymandering cases to be heard Tuesday.
If the Supreme Court decides the congressional maps in either Wisconsin or Maryland violate the Constitution by relegating some voters into irrelevance, it could signal a sea change in the way legislatures controlled by one party have tried to rig the mapmaking process.
“Our hope is that there is a concern about basic fairness,” says Dan Vicuna, national redistricting manager at Common Cause, which is challenging the North Carolina map. “Either side of the political aisle can be the victim of this.”
For the past decade, Democrats have been victimized by gerrymandering the most. Republicans seized power in many states in the 2010 midterm elections, giving them control over the redistricting process. Now Democrats are at a disadvantage entering the 2020 elections, which will determine who draws the next decade’s state and congressional lines in most states.
“Where extreme partisan gerrymandering exists, district lines are drawn in a manner that ensures that all seats remain safe,” former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, both Republicans, argue in court papers. “In such districts, elections are as predictable as a Harlem Globetrotters game.”