Court again confronts one-sided political maps
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will hear claims this week that Democrats try to game the political system with the same zeal employed by Republicans. They just don’t have as many opportunities.
The challenge mounted by opponents of Maryland’s congressional district lines will give the court a second opportunity within six months to find a blatantly partisan election map unconstitutional — something it has never done before.
Hundreds of members of Congress and thousands of state legislators are elected in districts drawn to favor the party that controls state government. That has largely favored Republicans in the past decade, as the justices heard in October when confronted by Wisconsin’s partisan artistry.
The lines in some major states are so one-sided that Democrats would need a landslide in November to win control of the House of Representatives, a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law says. In Ohio, Michigan and North Carolina, where Republicans control a combined 31 of 43 seats in Congress, the report says, Democrats would need to win the statewide vote to add any more House seats.
The case to be heard Wednesday will give the high court a chance to see how Democrats designed Maryland’s map with similar strong-arm tactics. That could help assuage Chief Justice John Roberts’ concern that appearing to favor one party over another would affect the court’s “status and integrity” in the eyes of average Americans.
By focusing on partisan line-drawing in states controlled by Democrats as well as Republicans, “the Supreme Court can say partisan gerrymandering is wrong whether it’s done by Democrats or Republicans, and this is why we need to rein it in,” says Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause.
The Maryland map in question gives Democrats a virtual lock on seven of eight seats in the House of Representatives. The Wisconsin map debated last fall left Republicans with 63 of 99 seats in the lower house of an otherwise politically balanced state.
Maryland and Wisconsin are not alone in their political favoritism, and therein lies the rub for the Supreme Court. A decision striking down one or both maps could threaten equally partisan state and federal district lines from Texas to Massachusetts.
“Any win by the plaintiffs in either of these cases is going to trigger more litigation,” says Dale Ho, director of voting rights at the American Civil Liberties Union. A victory, he says, could range from “significant” to “revolutionary.”
Presidents are chosen not by popular vote but the electoral votes of each state. U.S. senators are not apportioned by population but equally, giving Delaware as many as California.
The House of Representatives and state legislatures are intended to be more democratic. But as state legislators improve their ability to pick voters with sophisticated data-mining tools — rather than voters picking the legislators — they become less democratic by the decade.
Some legislatures are split between Republicans and Democrats, forcing compromise. Some states let independent or bipartisan commissions draw the lines. In others, courts imposed them — most recently in Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court struck down maps that helped Republicans win 13 of 18 seats in Congress.
In states such as Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and a large swath of the South, Republicans set the rules. Maryland is among a few states, along with Illinois and Massachusetts, where Democrats draw the lines.
After the 2010 Census, Maryland Democrats devised a way to give their party a 7-1 edge in Congress. They did it by moving tens of thousands of Republicans out of the 6th congressional district, which borders West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, and replacing them with tens of thousands of Democrats from the suburbs of Washington.
The district’s Republican congressman, Roscoe Bartlett, went from winning by 28 percentage points in 2010 to losing by 21 percentage points in 2012.
“Any win by the plaintiffs in either of these cases is going to trigger more litigation.” Dale Ho American Civil Liberties Union