Supreme Court to rule on gerrymandering, census
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is set to rule this month on two issues that could shape political power in the decade ahead — and also shape perceptions of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court he leads.
With the court’s term coming down to its final weeks, the justices are due to decide on the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering, a practice that allows party leaders to draw maps for election districts that ensure their candidates will win most of their races. And they will rule on the Trump administration’s plan to ask all households about the citizenship status of family members as part of the 2020 census.
The pair of political disputes puts the chief justice in an awkward spot.
“To put it bluntly, both of these cases have major implications for the future of the Republican Party,” said Elizabeth B. Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a self-described progressive group. “If Roberts truly cares about the public perceiving him and his colleagues as something other than politicians in robes, he should be very worried by the potential impact to the legitimacy and public standing of the court.”
Thanks to President Donald Trump’s election and Republican control of the Senate, Roberts leads a court with five Republican appointees who can outvote the four Democratic appointees. He is also a conservative who played a lead role in striking down limits on campaign spending and a key part of the Voting Rights Act’s special protections for minority voters throughout the South.
But Roberts also has sought to distance the court from what he calls the “partisan rancor” in Washington.
“We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” he has publicly said. When President Trump derided an “Obama judge” in November, Roberts issued a rare statement to rebuke the president. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said.
The chief justice also has made clear that he would like to avoid 5-4 rulings in the biggest cases, like the dispute over partisan gerrymandering. To avoid that split in the gerrymandering case, he probably would need to enlist Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, both Democratic appointees, in a compromise ruling that left open future legal challenges to overly partisan election maps.
Gerrymandering was hardly a Republican invention. Democrats in California and Illinois were among the pioneers in drawing election maps to lock in majorities for their candidates.
But in the 2010 midterm election, the GOP won full control in states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Republicans drew election maps that ensured their party would typically win a lopsided majority of the seats. Those gerrymanders helped the Republicans protect their majority in the House of Representatives until the Democratic wave in 2018 and kept them in control of all five of the state legislatures even though Democrats won more votes in those states.
Citing the partisan tilt, judges recently have struck down the district maps in each of those states on the grounds that Democratic voters were denied the right to a fair and equal vote.
The Supreme Court, however, has never struck down a partisan gerrymander. The justices sounded closely split in March when they heard an appeal from North Carolina’s Republican leaders, who freely admitted they drew the districts for a “partisan advantage,” aiming to ensure Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats.