Courts must take the lead on gerrymandering

With state legislatures dragging their feet, it’s incumbent on judges to restore some semblance of balance.

Good grief. A diagram of recent court cases challenging gerrymandering in Pennsylvania and other states is itself starting to look like a badly mangled congressional district.

Recently, federal judges in Pennsylvania and North Carolina came to opposite conclusions about whether Republican attempts to perpetuate power through district mapdrawing violated the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

A three-judge panel in North Carolina said “yes,” unanimously, and ordered lawmakers to draw up a new map for this year’s midterm elections. They also found the gerrymander violated the First Amendment and the Equal Protection clause.

A three-judge panel in Pennsylvania, in a 2-1 decision, went the other way, saying redistricting is a partisan process that requires a political solution, not a court-ordered one. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? On the weight of the evidence, both courts had reason to overturn obvious gerrymanders.

In both cases, Republicans leaders freely testified they fed partisan data into sophisticated computer programs to minimize the chances of Democrats winning congressional races.

In Pennsylvania, this contributed to Republicans winning and holding 13 of 18 congressional seats, despite the fact the Democrats received many more votes overall. In North Carolina, the GOP secured 10 of 13 seats.

That’s not anyone’s idea of fairness, and it needs to be changed — hopefully in time for upcoming elections.

While we wish the Pennsylvania judges had ordered an immediate do-over, we respect the argument that judges shouldn’t be doing the jobs of legislators.

Yet that argument doesn’t hold water here — not in the way this practice has been honed and perfected in today’s crazy, uber-partisan atmosphere and frozen in place.

Gerrymandering — by either party — allows legislators to choose their voters, instead of the other way around.

Gerrymandering in state legislative districts is doubly insidious. It concentrates partisan power among those who could initiate reform but have no incentive to do so as long as they’re insulated from a healthy cross-section of voters and serious election challenges.

Say what you will about judicial activism — we don’t think the people who drew up the U.S and state constitutions expected their successors to so refine the art of redistricting as to hand-pick their constituencies, right down to the street address.

The best approach would be for Pennsylvania and other states to set up independentminded citizen commissions to oversee the process of redistricting.

Bills to accomplish this are being considered in Harrisburg, but again — parties in power have no incentive to change. And they have the power to thwart reform.

We’d like to think that voters in 2018 will rise up and demand this sort of fairness.

But reforming redistricting, government ethics and campaign finance is a tough sell on the street — especially among people who have been disillusioned and believe, rightfully, that the deck has been stacked against them in elections and by deep-pocketed special interests.

This court docket is crowded. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a redistricting appeal brought by plaintiffs, based on the state constitution. (In December, a Commonwealth Court judge upheld the state’s congressional map.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering gerrymandering appeals from Wisconsin, Maryland and Texas.

It’s time to revise the rules to restore balance. If state legislatures won’t do it, the courts must order them to redraw — and redraw and redraw, if necessary — until a constitutional semblance of fairness has been met.

This isn’t the easiest thing to define. On the other hand, it’s easy to identify extreme gerrymandering when you see it — and to understand how the 21st century version of this abuse threatens one of the foundations of our democratic way of life:

The idea that one vote is equal to any other.