Wisconsin redistricting case could reshape politics

Supreme Court’s decision will ripple across U.S.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Supreme Court justices showed deep divisions Tuesday over a gerrymandering case from Wisconsin that could have far-reaching national implications.

Liberal justices expressed openness to the idea that courts should intervene when lawmakers draw election maps that greatly favor their parties. Conservatives were skeptical that judges could come up with a way to determine whether and when legislators had gone too far.

In the middle of it all — as expected — was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Both sides see him as the one who will likely cast the deciding vote, and they pitched their arguments to him.

A three-judge panel last year ruled 2-1 that maps for the Wisconsin Assembly were so heavily Republican that they violated the constitutional rights of Democratic voters. Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether the lower court got the ruling right.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned what would happen to the “precious right to vote” with maps like Wisconsin’s that lock in a majority for one party.

“If you can stack a legislature in this way, what incentive is there for a voter to exercise his vote?” she asked. “Whether it’s a Democratic district or a Republican district, the result — using this map, the result is preordained in most of the districts.”

Chief Justice John Roberts countered that legislatures have long been the ones in most states to determine where political lines are drawn.

“The whole point is you’re taking these issues away from democracy and you’re throwing them into the courts,” he told the attorney for the group of Wisconsin voters who brought the case.

If they succeed, the nation’s high court will have to decide in case after case whether to toss out maps favoring one party over the other, he said. And the public will suspect the court’s rulings are based on partisanship, he warned.

“That is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country,” he said.

The stakes are high for Wisconsin’s Democrats, who have been out of power for seven years. The case represents one of their last shots — if not their very last shot — of gaining a foothold in the Legislature in the foreseeable future.

But the case could also have a broad national impact. If Wisconsin’s maps are thrown out, states will have to follow new rules when they draw congressional and legislative districts, limiting their abilities to give edges to either party.

The packed gallery included Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican former governor of California who has championed redistricting reform, and Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), one of the top leaders to sign off on the GOPfriendly maps.

The Supreme Court has long wrestled with the question of whether maps can be so one-sided as to violate the Constitution.

Both sides focused their arguments on Kennedy, who has written that overly partisan maps can violate the Constitution but that courts have never had a way to measure when that happens.

“When legislatures think about drawing these maps, they’re not only thinking about the next election, they’re thinking often — not always — but often about the election after that and the election after that and the election after that.” U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN