WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a decision with nationwide impact on how congressional districts are drawn, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday said it’s beyond the reach of the judiciary to invalidate Maryland and North Carolina congressional districts that were configured to favor one political party.
The decision will likely affect a similar court challenge to Ohio’s congressional districts and means that Ohio will almost certainly have the same gerrymandered map for the 2020 congressional elections.
The 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts declared that partisan gerrymandering claims “present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
“To hold that legislators cannot take their partisan interests into account when drawing district lines would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities,” said the decision, which was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. “Determining that lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that districting was constitutionally impermissible.”
The decision said its finding “neither condones excessive partisan gerrymandering nor condemns complaints about districting to echo into a void.”
“Numerous States are actively addressing the issue through state constitutional amendments and legislation placing power to draw electoral districts in the hands of independent commissions, mandating particular districting criteria for their mapmakers, or prohibiting drawing district lines for partisan advantage,” it continued. “The Framers also gave Congress the power to do something about partisan gerrymandering in the Elections Clause. That avenue for reform established by the Framers, and used by Congress in the past, remains open.”
U.S. Supreme Court weighs crackdown on gerrymandered congressional districts
Liberal Justices decried the voter disenfranchisement that gerrymandered districts produce, while members of the conservative majority questioned how the courts should decide which remapping plans should be deemed too partisan.
Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissent that argued the gerrymandered districts “enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office” against voters’ preferences, promoting partisanship ahead of the popular will.
“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” said the dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
It said that courts around the country have “coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims” that limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges don’t “become omnipresent players in the political process.”
“The standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms,” Kagan argued. “In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.”
The North Carolina case questioned legality of Republican-drawn congressional districts that gave the party a 10-to-3 advantage in a state where nearly half the congressional vote goes to Democrats. The Maryland case examined a remap where Democrats who controlled that state’s legislature drew lines that targeted one of Maryland’s two Republican Congress members for defeat.
Just as Ohio Republicans did in 2011 when they drew the state’s maps to give the GOP a 12-to-4 edge in congressional seats, Maryland and North Carolina mappers used techniques called “packing” and “cracking” to retain their partisan advantage. That means they packed the maximum number of their opponents’ voters into the fewest possible districts, and put the rest into places where they wouldn’t be concentrated enough to affect the mapping party’s dominance.
U.S. Supreme Court delays court-ordered Ohio congressional remap
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has issued an order in Ohio’s redistricting case.
Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment last year that created a new bipartisan procedure for drawing district lines after the next census, for a map that will take effect in 2022. Its current map is being challenged in a Cincinnati federal court.
In May, a three-judge federal panel unanimously ruled that Ohio’s gerrymandered congressional map is unconstitutional, and ordered the creation of a new map in time for the 2020 election. A few weeks later, the Supreme Court granted the state’s request to delay the remap until after Thursday’s decision because it’s so likely to affect the Ohio case and the congressional maps the state will use during the 2020 election.
Organizations and individuals who challenged the rigged maps said they violate the Constitution by taking away voters’ ability to select candidates in a general election. They contend the maps violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, its Equal Protection Clause and its Elections Clause and contribute to dysfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives by making sure representatives are selected in party primaries instead of general elections. They argue this makes legislators more responsive to party insiders, and makes it harder to achieve bipartisan compromise in Congress.
Lawyers for the states whose maps were challenged say the nation’s founders wanted politically accountable state legislatures to draw congressional lines, not the judiciary. The state of Ohio signed onto a legal brief that agrees with them. That brief argued that court intervention “invites judges to choose the winners and losers in both redistricting and in the state legislatures based on the judges’ own political leanings.”
Here’s why political gerrymandering matters to average voters
Here’s why gerrymandering decisions matter to average voters; case in point: Ohio.
After Thursday’s decision, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost issued a statement that noted Ohio voters “already elected to redesign our line-drawing process by a Constitutional Amendment.”
“Power to legislate belongs to the legislature, or to the people — not to the courts,” Yost said. “Today’s decision is in line with these principles.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit contesting the legality of Ohio’s current congressional maps, said the ruling means courts can’t hear its case “and it will be up to the voters to make sure their representatives are accountable through legislative initiatives and citizen action.”
“The court’s decision to allow the practice of gerrymandering to continue, to flourish, and to evade review by the judicial system, leaves it in the hands of those who will continue to abuse their awesome power whenever they can to defeat the will of the voters,” said a statement from Freda Levenson, legal director of ACLU of Ohio. “In Ohio, this means that in the 2020 election, the map, rather than the electorate, will once again determine who occupies each of our congressional seats.”
Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper issued a statement that called the decision “disappointing” and said it wouldn’t change the fact that “an overwhelming majority of Ohio voters have twice made clear that they’ve had it with rigged elections and therefore voted to change Ohio’s Constitution to assure fair districts.”
“In our elections, every voice should be heard, and every vote should count equally,” said Pepper. “Elections should be determined by voters, not politicians who rig maps.”
Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, whose congressional district was drawn to include much of Cleveland in Ohio’s last remap, issued a statement that said the ruling undermines democratic participation for millions of voters in Ohio and across the United States. She argued it would open the floodgates for “extreme, partisan gerrymandering to go on completely unchecked in the United States.”
“Today’s ruling has direct implications for the people of Ohio,” her statement said. “Ohio’s deeply partisan districts were gerrymandered by Republicans for Republicans, not the people. They were drawn without regard for existing communities and deliberately diluted the votes of millions of voters. In 2018, 2,245,403 Ohioans voted to send a Republican representative to Congress and 2,019,120 voted to send a Democrat – 52 percent to 47 percent. And yet only four Democrats were elected last fall, compared to 12 Republicans. Fortunately, Ohioans have already taken an important first step to implement commonsense redistricting reform when they overwhelmingly voted in favor of Issue 1 in 2018.”
Ohio shouldn’t be ‘buffaloed’ into redrawing congressional maps, state tells Supreme Court
Attorneys defending Ohio’s congressional maps filed legal briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday that asked it to delay a remap of the state’s congressional districts until the Supreme Court rules on pending gerrymandering cases from other states.