Kansas' top court: State constitution allows partisan redistricting
TOPEKA, KAN. >> Kansas' top court declared Tuesday that the state constitution doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering, prompting one dissenting justice to accuse the majority of ignoring a “full-scale assault on democracy” from a Republican congressional redistricting law.
The state Supreme Court issued the opinion explaining its 4-3 decision last month to approve the new congressional map. It previously issued only a brief opinion that did not explain the majority's reasons.
The new map makes it harder for the only Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation, twoterm Rep. Sharice Davids, to win reelection in her Kansas City-area district. Davids is the state's first openly lesbian and Native American woman in Congress.
Dissenting Justice Eric Rosen argued that the decision moves Kansas toward a “one-party system of government,” aids a “power grab” and authorizes “political chicanery.”
“In turning a blind eye to this full-scale assault on democracy in Kansas, the majority blithely ignores the plain language of this state's Constitution,” Rosen wrote.
Lawsuits over new congressional maps proliferated this year across the U.S., with Republicans looking to recapture a U.S. House majority in November's midterm elections. Maps in at least 18 states inspired lawsuits, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for
Justice.
In the Kansas Supreme Court's majority opinion Tuesday, Justice Caleb Stegall said the state constitution's guarantee of equal legal protection for all citizens does not prohibit the Legislature from considering partisan factors when redrawing lines each decade to make districts as equal in population as possible. The Legislature has Republican supermajorities and traditionally has been controlled by the GOP.
Stegall also argued that unless the state Supreme Court set a “zero tolerance” standard on partisan gerrymandering, it has no clear standards for when it should be prohibited.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican running for governor, praised the court's majority, saying it “declined invitations to substitute its redistricting preferences for those of the people's elected representatives.”
Kansas courts previously
had not been asked to consider whether the state constitution bars political gerrymandering. Federal judges — not the Kansas courts — have typically reviewed the state's congressional boundaries, but the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2019 that complaints about partisan gerrymandering are political issues and not for the federal courts to resolve.
The majority also rejected critics' claims that the new congressional map represented racial gerrymandering because it split the Black and Hispanic populations in the Kansas City areas between two districts. Stegall wrote that the aggrieved voters did not show that race was the predominant factor in how the lines were drawn.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, which represented 11 voters, said in a statement that the decision was especially harmful to minority voters who were “targeted and silenced.”