The turtles win in Pa.
Politics drove the court’s gerrymandering
In “A Brief History of Time,” Stephen Hawking tells a story of a scientist who gave a lecture on astronomy — how the Earth revolves around the sun and the sun moves within the galaxy. Afterward, an old lady came up to him. “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise,” she said. Mr. Hawking continues: “The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘ You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’ “
This story reminds me about the never-ending fight over drawing political lines for state and federal elections. People make all sorts of principled arguments, but look closely and you’ll invariably see a political motive somewhere — namely, the desire to elect as many of your partisans as possible.
This intention was subtly on display last week when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unveiled its new congressional district map for federal House elections, overturning the 2011 map created by Republicans. Under the guise of nonpartisan, disinterested advocates of fair play, the Democratic majority on the court actually executed a bold power play to augment the political fortunes of its own side.
State and federal districts are redrawn every 10 years, after the decennial census. Last time around, in 2011, Republicans had total control of the government. So, they drew lines for the U.S. House of Representatives that heavily favored their party. This, by the way, is what pretty much every party does when given the chance. Democratic “gerrymanders” — as they are called — in Illinois and Maryland are just as extreme.
In January, the Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the map as violating the state constitution. It argued that the GOP, in its zeal to elect Republicans, drew district lines across too many counties and municipalities.
That is a very reasonable argument. What happened next — not so much.
Thestate Supreme Court then gave the governor and Legislature less than a month to formulate an alternative; otherwise, it was going to impose its own map. Never mind that the Constitution of the United States vests the power to set the “times, places and manner” of federal elections in state legislatures and that no state legislature in this day and age could possibly come up with a compromise in such a short span.
The truth is that the Democratic justices already had every intention of acting like the Legislature.
Nonpartisan analysts expected the redrawn map to help Democrats. And why not? Correcting a Republican gerrymander would have no other effect. But many were surprised by the amount of assistance the Supreme Court provided to Democrats. Within the broad mandate of not crossing municipal boundaries, Democrats on the court made choice after choice that helped Democrats running for the House of Representatives!
In other words, they drew a pro-Democratic gerrymander. Not as aggressive as what the state Republicans put together in 2011, but a gerrymander nonetheless. And they did so after setting a timetable that they had to have known the political institutions could not meet.
By the court’s own reckoning, Pennsylvania is divided fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans, wherein both parties deserve a modicum of representation. The majority Democrats argued, not without merit, that the 2011 map denied Democrats that opportunity in House races. But then, the Democratic justices turned around and produced a map that, in a political process where power is divided in a way that reflects public opinion in the state, never would have become law. Republicans in the Legislature never would have agreed to this map, which, according to Nate Cohn of The New York Times, was actually more favorable to Democrats than the ones offered by the Democratic governor and lieutenant governor. Why would the court do this? It’s turtles all the way down.