Posted on 07/05/2019 4:50:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new," writes Chief Justice John Roberts near the beginning of his opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause. "Nor is frustration with it." The question is what, if anything, federal courts ought to do about it. The answer the chief justice and the four other Republican-appointed justices have endorsed, journalists have been reporting, is nothing.
Actually, judges have a very effective weapon to limit, though not prohibit, partisan districting -- which we'll get to later. But first, let's be clear that the chief justice is right about the history of the issue. He is correct in disagreeing with Justice Kagan's suggestion in her dissent that partisan districting has gotten much more common and effective in recent years.
The word "gerrymander" is a clue. It's named after Elbridge Gerry, delegate to the Constitutional Convention and fifth vice president of the United States who, as a Jeffersonian in Massachusetts, packed heavily Federalist towns into a single salamander-shaped congressional district in 1812. That was 207 years ago.
The fact is that once you are committed to having legislators elected by districts, and once you have competitive political parties, it is going to matter how you draw district lines, and any competent partisan will struggle to draw them to its maximum advantage.
The founders, following the example of the British Parliament, quickly opted against at-large elections and proportional representation in states -- something perfectly permissible under the Constitution -- and in favor of election by geographically defined districts. And in 1842, Congress -- influenced perhaps by Britain's 1832 Reform Act, which eliminated representation for towns with no population and provided it for growing industrial cities -- required states to draw compact and contiguous districts of equal population.
In 1929, Congress repealed those last provisions, and legislatures' refusal to update districting plans in line with population changes inspired lawsuits. The Supreme Court dismissed them in the 1940s, but in 1963 and 1964 it ruled that congressional and legislative districts within each state had to be of equal population. That requirement, scarcely mentioned in Rucho, has operated quietly as a severe limit on politicians' ability to gain partisan advantage from districting, and its arithmetic standard is easily policed by courts.
As co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics" for more than 40 years, I have been closely following redistricting plans in every state every cycle since the censuses of 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. Democrats dominated the redistricting processes in the 1970s and 1980s, with little adverse comment. Conservatives still yearned for the pre-equal population plans, which favored agrarian districts. And liberals were delighted by plans concocted by the likes of California's Rep. Phil Burton.
But liberals were suddenly shocked and appalled when Republicans dominated the redistricting process in big states like Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan in the cycles following the 2000 and 2010 censuses.
Changes in political demographics helped Republicans there and elsewhere. Democratic voters have increasingly been concentrated in central cities, a few sympathetic suburbs and university towns; Republican voters are spread more evenly around the rest of the country. Any equal-population plan tends to work against a party that wins by margins like 80-20 in a few districts and loses by margins closer to 55-45 in many more.
Justice Kagan expressed liberals' frustration and -- not too strong a word -- rage. She portrays partisan districting as fatally undermining electoral democracy. To one who has followed the fate of redistricting plans in detail over the last half-century -- and who has seen how the intentions of redistricters have been frustrated by changes in public opinion and political alignments -- these plaints seem overwrought.
Time and again, aggressive partisan redistricting plans, from those of California Democrats in the 1960s to those of Pennsylvania Republicans in the 2000s and 2010s, have boomeranged. Despite Republicans' redistricting advantages in the last two decades, Democrats won big House majorities in 2006, 2008 and 2018.
In any case, partisan redistricting will be on the wane in the 2020 census cycle. Michigan, Ohio and Colorado have joined California, Washington and Iowa in creating redistricting commissions, which are supposedly nonpartisan (but which, as Capital Research Center scholars have shown, effectively lean Democratic). A Florida referendum limits Republican redistricters there, and 2018 governor elections left fewer states with total partisan control. In partisan terms, redistricting in the 2020 cycle looks like a wash.
So it's wise to shut the courtroom door to lawsuits that risk partisanizing the federal courts by requiring judges to decide cases with "no judicially discoverable and manageable standards."
Gerrymandering is a political problem. The USSC doesn't exist to fix political problems.
This was the exact right ruling. Congratulations to the Court.
Tell that to the Republican legistlature in Pennsylvania who were ordered by the state court to redistricting the maps that favored the GOP. Those state judges should have been impeached and then executed.
Kagan's appalling track record to date indicates her Obama-like devotion to the idea that the ends justify the means and that we are a government with a nation attached rather than the other way round.
She is constantly using the status quo as 'evidence' of something not only existing but NEEDING to exist and NEEDING to persist. She employs absurd hypotheticals to 'prove' her point.
Drawing district lines is the epitome of democracy since the lines are drawn by elected representatives - and certainly not by judges.
I'm not a big fan of oddly shaped districts but on the other hand I'm in such a district now and it's no coincidence that property, jobs, retail, etc. are upscale and high-value while mere miles away in another district they are not.
I’m at the point that the tyranny of the lower courts should be addressed by impeachment, removal, tarring, feathering and hanging ........
The issue is not oddly or misshapen districts.
The issue is that the states can do what they want. The issue is not a federal matter.
There are a lot of issues that the court should turn back to the law makers. Like abortion.
He made up for it with his dumbass decision about the “ARE YOU A U.S. CITIZEN?” on the Census forms. Socialist “democrats” won that one, BIGLY.
I can’t figure why conservatives are happy with this. Roberts let stand rulings against gerrymandering when the effect is to weaken the party of choice of black voters, even when that gerrymandering results in more black elected officials. Basically the court is saying that Democrats CAN gerrymander, but Republicans cannot.
And frequently, odd or misshapen districts have completely non-partisan purposes, such as the infamous districts of Texas.
When you look at some of the Democrat-voting districts in Texas, you might imagine that they were drawn to corral all the Democrats into the same district. Then you see that the surrounding districts are ALSO very blue. They were created to ensure that people who share a representative have something in common with one another.
This fixation on shape is nonsense. If two communities are connected by a handful of large farms, that looks OK on a map, even if those farms are a physical barrier between the two communities. On the other hand, if they are connected by a thoroughfare, that looks like gerrymandering, even if they literally bridge communities where people work in common.
When an elective administrative office district such as a mayoral alderman, town board even congressional seats gets cut up for political reasons because of race or ethnic identity the areas within it suffer.
Roberts voted the way he did because the Rats do it too and he was protecting those seats.
As a lifelong PA resident, I agree wholeheartedly!!!
Impeach those Pa SC Justices who voted in favor of redrawing Pa lines!!!!!!!
That’s not the case for a number of southern states
Now if he would stay the hell out of other political disputes.
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