The Republican gerrymanders of 2010 may make it harder for Democrats to translate votes efficiently into seats, but strong Democratic turnout could dampen the gerrymanders' effect.
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In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled extreme partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional.
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Obviously, these voter restrictions and extreme partisan gerrymanders aren't fair.
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Pennsylvania has one of the harshest gerrymanders in the country.
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"Pennsylvania is probably the most aggressive of the gerrymanders," he said.
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The case against partisan gerrymanders is not merely a Democratic one.
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Too many gerrymanders have been weakened by the courts since 2014.
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But which came first: the extreme gerrymanders or the heightened polarization?
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But the House GOP seemed confident that their gerrymanders would hold.
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Miller, 115 S.Ct. 20153 (1995), that redistricting plans constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
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Miller, 115 S.Ct. 2475 (1995), that redistricting plans constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
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"These are the most effective gerrymanders by a long shot," Li said.
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"North Carolina's maps were among the worst racial gerrymanders in the nation."
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Courts struck down Republican gerrymanders in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
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The Supreme Court has occasionally struck down voting districts as racial gerrymanders.
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In 2011 Republicans drew some of the worst gerrymanders in the country.
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In 85033 Republicans drew some of the worst gerrymanders in the country.
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Some of these gerrymanders have since been weakened or dismantled by courts.
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As in all gerrymanders, Wisconsin's mapmakers hobbled their opponents in two ways.
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Rucho, which held that federal courts may not even consider challenges to partisan gerrymanders, was rooted in the proposition that it's just too hard to come up with a principled way to determine which maps are unconstitutional gerrymanders.
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Every 10 years, editorial writers would condemn the crass gerrymanders that had resulted.
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Many Americans cast ballots whose weight was diluted by precise, data-driven gerrymanders.
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"North Carolina is the most brazen of all the gerrymanders," Professor Hasen said.
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Gerrymanders dilute a minority group's votes, muffling its voice in the political process.
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But Kennedy simply signed Roberts's opinion and raised no concerns about extreme political gerrymanders.
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But Kennedy was unwilling to bar all future claims of injury from partisan gerrymanders.
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K., we've been fighting over gerrymanders through the poisonous lens of race,' '' Persily suggests.
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The point is not that the last round of Republican gerrymanders is completely dead.
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The issue has to do with an absence of a reliable measure for partisan gerrymanders.
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In contrast, modern gerrymanders protect the party in power even when the votes aren't there.
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Even rarer, however, are extreme gerrymanders where the politicians are so blatant about their plot.
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These are known as gerrymanders -- much more on that term here -- in the political business.
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"The 2010 redistricting cycle produced some of the worst partisan gerrymanders on record," she wrote.
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A string of lawsuits dating back decades have argued that partisan gerrymanders violate the Constitution.
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A Supreme Court ruling outlawing at least some such gerrymanders could reshape the political landscape.
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The challengers say they have identified a mathematical formula to help identify unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
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The court itself has agreed that some partisan gerrymanders could violate the Equal Protection Clause.
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This district-by-district approach to attacking partisan gerrymanders will now move to center stage.
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These districts are sort of the reverse of the fragile gerrymanders and the underperforming incumbents.
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"These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences," they wrote.
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If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.
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Until that happens everywhere, the court must step in and stop the most egregious gerrymanders.
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So the Court upheld egregious gerrymanders helping Republicans in North Carolina and Democrats in Maryland.
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In the most egregious partisan gerrymanders, maps generally ignore some or all of those strictures.
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Wes Pegden 'It is really one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in modern American history.
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Designers of gerrymanders ignore the possibility of a 100-year flood, so their dikes are shallow.
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It would have enacted new maps ahead of this year's midterms to remedy the racial gerrymanders.
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Some state constitutions offer more favorable legal grounds for attacking gerrymanders than the national Constitution does.
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That would set up another legal battle over gerrymanders in a year already filled with them.
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The question is important because both methods of analysis are routinely employed to identify Republican gerrymanders.
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All four Democrats agreed that, at the very least, courts should dismantle the most egregious gerrymanders.
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But in numerous key states, Republican gerrymanders are either gone or on the cusp of collapse.
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In others, the GOP's congressional gerrymanders remain intact even as the state legislative maps have changed.
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Democrats tend to bunch together in cities anyway, but partisan gerrymanders can make their under-representation worse.
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But Kennedy at the time was unwilling to bar all future claims of injury from partisan gerrymanders.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court held that two gerrymanders passed by the North Carolina legislature were unconstitutional.
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"The current Ohio map is one of the most egregious gerrymanders in recent history," the lawsuit states.
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Here's why: Court rulings have weakened or undone Republican gerrymanders in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
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That's why Justice Elena Kagan pointed to partisan gerrymanders as an existential threat to democratic self-rule.
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If they can develop and apply neutral and manageable standards to identify unconstitutional gerrymanders, why couldn't we?
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Of these six states, Florida and Pennsylvania's congressional gerrymanders were weakened — or rolled back entirely — by courts.
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Challenges to extreme gerrymanders in Wisconsin and Maryland—one favouring Republicans, the other Democrats—faltered on technical grounds.
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And partisan gerrymanders are more extreme and more frequent than at any point in the past 40 years.
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The question: Are extreme partisan gerrymanders violations of either the equal protection clause or possibly the First Amendment?
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"Courts -- and in particular this court -- will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders," Kagan wrote.
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Opponents have argued in a string of lawsuits dating back decades that extreme partisan gerrymanders violate the Constitution.
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Advocates of voting rights see him as their best — and perhaps only — hope to rein in partisan gerrymanders.
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The Wisconsin case underscores how modern gerrymanders, using computers and political and behavioral data, have become increasingly effective.
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It would be a shame if a movement organised around electoral fairness resulted in egregious gerrymanders to favour Democrats.
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Upcoming cases In the coming days and weeks, the court will deal with two separate cases about partisan gerrymanders.
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Nearly a decade later, those gerrymanders are still tilting the House toward Republicans, particularly in a few key states.
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If that happens, they say, an emphatic ruling against partisan gerrymanders would rank with another redistricting decision: Baker v.
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The Wisconsin case heads four legal actions on partisan gerrymanders that the Supreme Court could consider and, perhaps, consolidate.
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This is also probably Justice Kennedy's last chance to serve as the crucial fifth vote in holding partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional.
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Despite all this, most observers expect that Chief Justice Roberts will vote to uphold the partisan gerrymanders in these cases.
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And only the courts can do anything to remedy the problem, because gerrymanders benefit those who control the political branches.
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"Courts -- and in particular this court -- will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders," Justice Elena Kagan wrote.
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The extreme gerrymanders they produced ensure that Democrats will need a nearly unprecedented electoral earthquake to take any additional seats.
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First, technological improvements have allowed line drawers to use sophisticated software and demographic analysis to create ever more effective gerrymanders.
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The demographic pressures facing Republicans could push them to take more extreme steps to preserve power, like even harsher gerrymanders.
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Yet even if a majority of the justices agree, that may not carry the day for the opponents of gerrymanders.
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But as map-drawing software has grown more sophisticated and voters more polarized, the district gerrymanders have become more pernicious.
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The conservative wing of the court has also focused on upholding voting restrictions, gerrymanders and purges of the registration rolls.
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A panel of three federal judges ruled that 34 congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
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And the aggressive gerrymanders, of course, would inevitably land in courts, which is the last place most politicians want to be.
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State and federal court rulings in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have eroded or even completely undone Republican partisan gerrymanders.
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And in 2018, challenges to devastating gerrymanders in Wisconsin and Maryland (one for each party) came up short on procedural grounds.
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State courts continue to invalidate partisan gerrymanders, including in Pennsylvania and Florida, feeding the litigation pipeline and building momentum for reform.
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Mr. Hasen and others have speculated that the Supreme Court may now be willing to reconsider the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders.
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Our findings add to the abundant evidence showing the degree to which technology and data-fueled 21st-century gerrymanders warp democracy.
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In an era of growing geographic polarization, these gerrymanders can be quite durable and can even become more effective over time.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican and the former governor of California, is leading a movement to outlaw gerrymanders of any political stripe.
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Beginning in 2013, critics charged in state and later federal courts that two of the 13 House districts were racial gerrymanders.
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They then used that control to enact aggressive gerrymanders that all-but-ensured Republican dominance in state legislative and congressional elections.
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In this case, the Court's signal was clear: No matter how much partisan gerrymanders disenfranchise voters, the Court will not interfere.
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Such gerrymanders are sometimes easy to spot: To pick up the right combination of voters, cartographers may design districts that meander bizarrely.
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A state court found that North Carolina's congressional districts were drawn with gerrymanders designed to benefit Republicans that violate the State Constitution.
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Republican Texas lawmakers have maintained that their voter maps followed "legally allowed political gerrymanders designed to handicap Democrats, not minorities," Bloomberg notes.
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Second, a three-judge federal district court panel issued a series of rulings holding that Texas' redistricting plans were unlawful racial gerrymanders.
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Scalia castigated agencies for illegal "interpretive gerrymanders," stating that they cannot keep portions of the law they favor and discard the rest.
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The latest lawsuit — filed by election advocacy groups and Democrats — said the replacement to the racial gerrymander also were unlawful partisan gerrymanders.
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"This is one of the most extreme gerrymanders ever drawn in living memory of the United States," Mr. Smith said on Tuesday.
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Others detected a hint that Justice Kennedy is not ready to rule that at least some partisan gerrymanders cross a constitutional line.
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The maps have been declared racial and partisan gerrymanders, invalidated multiple times, and they have generated millions of dollars in court costs.
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Pat McCrory is challenging a lower court ruling that held the state's Congressional Districts 1 and 85033 were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Rep.
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But the gains might have been even bigger, election experts said, if Republican gerrymanders hadn't been drawn to withstand a blue wave.
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Invalid voting maps: A panel of federal judges ruled on Thursday that 34 districts in Michigan are extreme partisan gerrymanders and unconstitutional.
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There's extensive case law on racial gerrymanders, which has established that racial discrimination in districting is subject to strict scrutiny by courts.
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But, amazingly enough, Republicans won nine of the state's 25 congressional districts, reflecting one of the worst pro-GOP gerrymanders in the country.
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Will the sophisticated computer-aided gerrymanders face a more sceptical audience this time round, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Justice Kennedy's old seat?
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Aggressive statewide gerrymanders like this — where one party's seats are maxed-out and locked-in despite radical swings in election results — are rare.
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He might have said the same for the judicial modesty the chief justice seemed to be advocating when it comes to addressing gerrymanders.
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Common Cause purports to take federal courts out of the business of policing partisan gerrymanders and leave the issue for states to handle.
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Even in wave elections, some of these gerrymanders will let a party preferred by a minority of voters capture a majority of seats.
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The ruling, after years of escalating battles over voter identification laws, gerrymanders and voter purges, left Democrats and voting rights advocates bitterly disappointed.
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The ruling follows decisions by four other federal courts striking down partisan gerrymanders in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Maryland and, last week, in Michigan.
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While the Supreme Court has struck down voting districts as racial gerrymanders, it has never disallowed a legislative map because of partisan gerrymandering.
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Partly because of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymanders based on race are flatly illegal, but ones based on partisan intent remain in limbo.
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The decisions are certain to have drawn the Supreme Court's interest as it mulls a resolution to the question of extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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Usually gerrymanders involve "flights of cartographic fancy" — outlandishly shaped districts, like the one that gave gerrymandering its name — but Wisconsin's districts were relatively compact.
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The result has been an explosion of research, both in new methods of detecting gerrymanders, as well as in analysis of metrics and algorithms.
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" On Tuesday, during a dispute over partisan gerrymanders, he said, "Maybe we can just for a second talk about the arcane matter, the Constitution.
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Doing so, in the case of Texas and Florida, would block some of the worst and most devastating partisan gerrymanders of the next decade.
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After he retired, some critics of partisan gerrymanders lamented that they might have lost their best hope at a judicial solution to the problem.
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Many people considered the Maryland and North Carolina cases the court's last opportunity for a generation to break the legal impasse over partisan gerrymanders.
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Months later, a district court ruled that all 28 state legislative districts in question were racial gerrymanders and unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
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The Pennsylvania ruling could also add some momentum to a clear movement in lower federal courts toward reining in the most severe partisan gerrymanders.
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In turn, that would translate into fewer districts in traditionally Democratic areas, and a new opportunity for Republican mapmakers to create even stronger gerrymanders.
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This self-serving entrenchment was at the heart of two cases involving extreme partisan gerrymanders before the United States Supreme Court this past term.
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Monday's decisions reject one means of challenging partisan gerrymanders under the Constitution, but the court is soon going to be faced with other approaches.
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In August, a federal court ruled that the state legislative map was unconstitutional because 28 of the districts drawn by Republicans constituted racial gerrymanders.
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The result is "the most extreme gerrymanders in modern history," according to a paper published in The University of Chicago Law Review last year.
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RALEIGH, N.C. — There have been four years of civil disobedience, reputation-bruising boycotts over bathroom access, and legal battles over voting laws and gerrymanders.
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Perhaps just as importantly, Republicans in the state have a history of extraordinary gerrymanders that redraw the state's congressional districts for their partisan gain.
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Eric McGhee, a political scientist who works for the Public Policy Institute of California, invented a new standard for measuring partisan gerrymanders: the efficiency gap.
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If the Court were to find partisan gerrymanders justiciable, the immediate effects would only be felt in Wisconsin, which would have to redraw its districts.
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Although the court has a standard to weed out extreme racial gerrymanders, it has never been able to settle on a standard for partisan gerrymandering.
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"Even though both were fairly egregious gerrymanders, I think that there's an argument to be made that the congressional maps were worse," said state Rep.
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Masterful Democratic gerrymanders in Maryland ensured that Republicans took only one of eight House seats in 2016, despite winning 37% of the two-party vote.
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The ruling is in response to the three-judge panel determining in August 2016 that 28 of the state's legislative districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
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The ruling was made in response to cases presented over district maps in Maryland and North Carolina, alleged to be instances of unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
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Federal judges relied on the same three tests in ruling maps unconstitutional in North Carolina, Maryland and Wisconsin, a fact opponents of gerrymanders called significant.
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But while the Supreme Court has struck down gerrymanders that were based on voters' race, it had yet to invalidate a map based on party.
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Democrats also benefited from a string of court decisions that eroded or outright eliminated Republican gerrymanders in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and, most recently, Pennsylvania.
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A decision to rein in partisan gerrymanders could reshape House maps in a number of states, largely but not exclusively to the benefit of Democrats.
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That highlights collateral damage from gerrymanders that is sometimes overlooked: Not only do they entrench a majority party, but they weaken the opposition as well.
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With his departure, lawyers and legal scholars say, Chief Justice John Roberts becomes the most likely justice to cast a fifth vote against partisan gerrymanders.
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It is the latest major legal effort arguing that gerrymanders have become so egregious they are subverting democracy and creating legislative races with predetermined results.
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The Texas and North Carolina cases, in which Republican-controlled state governments are accused of creating illegal racial gerrymanders, raise a different question about partisanship.
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"Between these two cases the justices really have all the options on the table to find a path to regulate extreme partisan gerrymanders," Levitt said.
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WASHINGTON — A panel of three federal judges ruled on Thursday that 21 congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan are extreme partisan gerrymanders and unconstitutional.
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Besides the Wisconsin and Maryland cases, partisan gerrymanders are under assault in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where courts invalidated Republican-drawn congressional maps this month.
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"To avoid future gerrymanders and court intervention, the legislature should now work toward creating an independent, impartial and accountable redistricting process," she said in a statement.
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If the justices divide 4-4 along ideological lines over both gerrymanders when they rule next spring or summer, a confounding state of affairs will ensue.
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The court's four liberal justices disagreed but failed to rally around a workable standard to determine which gerrymanders went too far and which ones did not.
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Gill isn't being overhyped: a ruling against extreme gerrymanders could re-jig American politics at the state and national levels for the coming decade and beyond.
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The justices have issued stays on orders by lower courts from earlier this year that struck down congressional districts in Ohio and Michigan as partisan gerrymanders.
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"The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people," Kagan continued.
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"Conservatives on the Supreme Court will never strike down even the most egregious gerrymanders unless Democrats prove that they can play the game too," Drum writes.
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But that is precisely the issue, voting-rights advocates say: Gerrymanders are creations of lawmakers, who have seldom had much interest in curbing their own power.
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Even so, he said, the larger number of Republican gerrymanders accounts for roughly half of the 24-seat advantage the party now holds in the House.
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The United States Supreme Court said this year the legislature created illegal racial gerrymanders in drawing election maps for Congress and its own members in 2011.
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Experts said it also presented a potentially crippling threat to growing efforts by voting rights advocates and Democrats to halt gerrymanders by legal and political means.
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In Utah, a group called Better Boundaries collected 0003,000 signatures, 75,000 more than were required, to place its proposition to end gerrymanders on the November ballot.
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Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is almost certain to cast the deciding vote in the case, suggested that extreme gerrymanders violate voters' right to freedom of association.
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Without these two anti-democratic features of our Constitution, it is likely that, at the very least, the most aggressive partisan gerrymanders would also be forbidden.
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In that case, he held out hope that the court could find a solution to extreme gerrymanders that political leaders were unable or unwilling to address.
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"Given that the federal courts are closed," he said, "I certainly expect this model to be used in other states where there are egregious partisan gerrymanders."
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Chief Justice Roberts' campaign finance jurisprudence offers a road map for striking down the North Carolina and Maryland partisan gerrymanders as a violation of the First Amendment.
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The same three-judge panel struck down most of the State Legislature's maps in September as Republican partisan gerrymanders, citing the same violations of state constitutional clauses.
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But even if the lawyers arguing against the gerrymanders manage to persuade a majority of the justices that their clients' complaints are sufficiently concrete, another obstacle arises.
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But it was uncertain, after more than two hours of oral arguments, whether a majority of the justices will decide that even ghastly gerrymanders violate America's constitution.
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Now, everyone has the playbook for creating extreme partisan gerrymanders, as well as the piles of voter data and powerful computers to put that playbook into action.
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Adopting a test for courts to strike down partisan gerrymanders would go a long way to ensuring that fair elections, not unfair election rules, decide who wins.
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Without extreme partisan gerrymanders, widespread voter suppression, and strict anti-immigration measures, the conservative political coalition may no longer be electorally viable in an increasingly diverse country.
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Still, for all the charges and countercharges on voter suppression, most of the momentum Tuesday was on measures quite likely to broaden voter participation and limit gerrymanders.
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The group has also joined lawsuits claiming racial gerrymanders of House districts in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, and is mounting grass-roots efforts to enact electoral reforms.
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Justice Kennedy noted then that computer technologies were revolutionizing the redistricting process, allowing parties to design virtually unassailable gerrymanders with data and software unavailable in decades past.
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There, state officials have admitted creating gerrymanders, but argue that they were motivated not by racial bias but by a partisan desire to cripple Democratic voters' influence.
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For the past few years, courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have thrown stumbling blocks in front of Republican legislators who've been drawing and defending friendly gerrymanders.
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Rulings like this one allow legislators to get away with illegal gerrymanders for an election or two simply because litigation takes so long & taxpayers pay the cost.
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A Brennan Center for Justice report released in May found that Republicans picked up 22019 to 17 congressional seats in the current Congress because of partisan gerrymanders.
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Arizona's and California's redistricting processes were not perfect, but they avoided creating extreme gerrymanders and they survived attempted litigation against them — including in one especially important ruling.
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The holding of Rucho is that federal courts may not intervene to prevent partisan gerrymandering (although they may step in to prevent states from drawing racial gerrymanders).
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"Social-science tools now allow courts to diagnose partisan gerrymanders with accuracy and precision," according to a brief from two political scientists who have helped draw district maps.
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These gerrymanders packed African American voters into comparatively few districts, undercutting their ability to form coalitions with other voters and elect more legislators who would represent their interests.
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Federal lawmakers could, for example, invoke the clause to forbid state legislatures from enacting the kinds of partisan gerrymanders that Rucho now blocks the federal courts from stopping.
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday blocked rulings from federal courts in Ohio and Michigan that had struck down voting maps in those states as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
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Critics of those gerrymanders argue that they violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection and perhaps also the 1st Amendment's assurances of the right to political association.
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Federal courts have struck down gerrymanders on racial grounds, but not on grounds that they unfairly give advantage to a political party — the more common form of gerrymandering.
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A series of gerrymanders requires a similar margin in the US House and a bigger one in state legislatures, and the Senate map is almost comically skewed against Democrats.
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One of America's most effective gerrymanders can be found in Ohio, where Republicans won 58% of votes for the House of Representatives in 2016 and 75% of the seats.
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In the recently completed annual session, for example, Roberts led the conservative majority in a highly consequential decision shutting the door to any federal lawsuit against extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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The four liberal justices -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- appeared ready to allow legal challenges to gerrymanders that disproportionately favor one party over another.
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Sure, she made it harder for the people who read that rant to identify partisan gerrymanders in the future, but at least she got a few thousand new followers.
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In this way, extreme gerrymanders may be limited under federalist principles without involving the Supreme Court, an institution that has failed to repair this serious bug in American democracy.
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When Democratic gerrymanders locked Republicans out of state offices and the House in the 1980s, he was their opponent, assisting plaintiffs in a landmark Supreme Court case, Davis v.
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" She added: "In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.
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In the Michigan case, a three-judge panel of a different Federal District Court ruled that 34 congressional and state legislative districts in the state were unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
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Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. worried aloud last year that creating a legal standard to identify partisan gerrymanders would turn the court into a sort of electoral kingmaker.
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For the same reason, the state court's decision has no direct bearing on a string of challenges to partisan gerrymanders that are already moving through the federal court system.
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"These new technologies may produce new methods of analysis that make more evident the precise nature of the burdens gerrymanders impose on the representational rights of voters," he added.
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The Republicans turned again to Mr. Hofeller in 2017, after federal courts ruled that 28 of the districts he had created were racial gerrymanders and had to be redrawn.
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And a North Carolina state court cited data from the backups last week in striking down partisan gerrymanders in State House and Senate maps that Mr. Hofeller had drawn.
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Court decisions in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have weakened Republican gerrymanders, while ballot initiatives in Michigan and Ohio seek to prevent either party from gerrymandering those states ever again.
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"Whether it is Democrats or Republicans manipulating the election maps, gerrymanders cheat voters out of true representation," Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, said in a statement.
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Indeed, one could imagine the Court holding that "partisan symmetry" is the right baseline for assessing gerrymanders but leaving it to the lower courts to decide which ones to use.
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Those Republican-drawn maps helped solidify the GOP's control of the House, retribution for Democratic-led gerrymanders that cemented that party's control of Congress for four decades ending in 28503.
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The justices have never established a standard to resolve extreme partisan gerrymanders, and on Friday, they announced they will hear two cases on the issue, from North Carolina and Maryland.
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One decision failed to stop the drive toward increasingly partisan gerrymanders, and the other temporarily blocked the Trump Administration's attempt to leverage the decennial United States Census for partisan advantage.
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That was certainly true in Virginia in 2011 -- where Virginia's Republican governor signed congressional and legislative maps that have since been struck down as illegal racial gerrymanders by the courts.
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The justices already have high-profile disputes over the administration's plan for a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, religious monuments on public land and partisan gerrymanders on their agenda.
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Eight years after the last round of redistricting, there are few if any other active court challenges to gerrymanders that could be affected by documents on Mr. Hofeller's storage drives.
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That suggestion came from Mr. Hofeller, the mastermind of a string of gerrymanders drawn in 2011 that locked the Republican Party into a decade of control in state legislatures nationwide.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday over whether congressional district maps in Maryland and North Carolina were unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders — favoring Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in North Carolina.
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Still, the courts' increased focus on the issue reflects the proliferation of extreme partisan gerrymanders — maps that do not merely hobble political opponents, but effectively doom them to permanent underrepresentation.
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The breadth of those cases, with three involving Republican gerrymanders in states that are major federal election battlegrounds, hints at the national political stakes involved in a Supreme Court ruling.
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WASHINGTON — For 14 years, as partisan gerrymanders across the country grew more extreme, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy came to symbolize hopes that the Supreme Court would eventually rein them in.
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But the question in the case was similar to one the justices addressed last month, in which the court struck down two of the state's congressional districts as racial gerrymanders.
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But others say that if a populous and politically byzantine state like California can make an independent commission work, wringing partisanship and gerrymanders out of politics can be done anywhere.
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But the big Democratic gains in well-educated areas create some odd dangers for the Republicans, especially in districts that continue to lean Republican by the margin of crafty gerrymanders.
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And as underscored by this week's Supreme Court decision invalidating two North Carolina congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, the justices are as fully engaged in combat as anyone else.
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The Maryland lawsuit proposes a solution that some justices have pondered: an argument that gerrymanders violate the First Amendment, not the 14th, by retaliating against opponents who express contrary views.
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The court has yet to decide two politically charged cases, one concerning the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census and another tackling extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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The reason why state partisan gerrymanders offend the First Amendment is pretty basic, drawing on deeply rooted First Amendment principles that have been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court time and again.
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"If Democrats are going to be able to block partisan gerrymanders from Republicans, they're going to have to win statewide office in key states where Republicans control the process," McDonald said.
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"Partisan gerrymanders have become more common, more severe and more durable in their effects," Paul Smith, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center who is representing the challengers, argued in briefs.
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Common Cause, which let stand partisan gerrymanders by Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in North Carolina, may put an end to the dominant approach to electoral reform in the United States.
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The court has never established a standard to resolve extreme partisan gerrymanders, and if it chooses to do so, it could revolutionize the way congressional and state legislative maps are drawn.
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Also not unusual: Holder, from his Covington perch, remains an important player in the party establishment — chairing the party's effort to fight Republican gerrymanders and otherwise very much in the mix.
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In recent years, Republicans have benefited far more from extreme gerrymanders, because of political trends and accidents of timing, but both parties are guilty of skewing maps when they're able to.
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Minutes before announcing that he voted against Republican interests in the census case, Roberts issued a separate, arguably more enduring, decision closing federal court doors to lawsuits against extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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"Whether it is Democrats or Republicans manipulating the election maps, gerrymanders cheat voters out of true representation," said Karen Flynn, the president of Common Cause, the plaintiffs in the North Carolina case.
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Last month, a state court in North Carolina unanimously struck down Republican-led efforts to maintain state legislative districts, holding that they amount to unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders that violate the state's Constitution.
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And amplifying the chief's much more reserved invitation to challengers, Justice Kagan wrote, "only the courts can do anything to remedy the problem, because gerrymanders benefit those who control the political branches".
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Kagan leavens her opinions with colloquial turns ("boatload"; "chutzpah"; "these are not your grandfather's—let alone the Framers'—gerrymanders"; a citation of Dr. Seuss) without sacrificing the requisite meticulousness of legal analysis.
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The Court heard two cases, one from Wisconsin and the other from Maryland, that represented egregious gerrymanders, or the practice of politicians drawing oddly-shaped district lines to keep themselves in power.
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In 2004, most of the justices agreed on "the incompatibility of severe partisan gerrymanders with democratic principles," in the words of none other than Justice Antonin Scalia, a frequent Stevens sparring partner.
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In the months leading up to Monday's Supreme Court punt on the gerrymandering cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland, those hoping the court would rein in partisan gerrymanders had been cautiously optimistic.
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Partisan gerrymanders are quite simply undemocratic and that is why Common Cause has fought them in the courts whether the lines were drawn by Republicans in North Carolina or Democrats in Maryland.
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"Social science tools now allow courts to diagnose partisan gerrymanders with accuracy and precision", according to an amicus brief from Keith Gaddie and Bernard Grofman, political scientists who have helped engineer district maps.
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Interestingly, Thomas is the only holdover from the 2001 case who didn't switch sides, which is both a credit to Thomas and a demonstration of how partisan views of racial gerrymanders have changed.
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They have depended on its conservative justices to curtail voting rights, to permit an unlimited flow of unaccountable corporate money into the political process and to allow the drawing of undemocratic congressional gerrymanders.
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RALEIGH, N.C. — Federal judges struck down nearly 30 North Carolina House and Senate districts on Thursday as illegal racial gerrymanders, but will allow General Assembly elections to be held using them this fall.
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Democrats, blessed with an unpopular incumbent president but cursed with a highly unfavorable set of House gerrymanders and an even more unfavorable Senate map, really need to fracture the GOP base to win.
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Virtually no public record of Mr. Hofeller's work on gerrymanders exists beyond the maps themselves, because he was obsessive about leaving no paper trail that could be used against his handiwork in court.
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But the rise of extreme partisan gerrymanders in the last decade, powered by a growing ideological divide and powerful map-drawing software, has brought the question back to the justices with new urgency.
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Now the court is as politicized as any in memory, cleaved into four reliably liberal justices who presumably favor limits on gerrymanders and four conservative justices who may want to let politicians decide.
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Decisions on two cases Monday by the Supreme Court — an alleged Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin and a Democratic one in Maryland — shut down one novel approach to attacking partisan gerrymanders on constitutional grounds.
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The panel reaffirmed those worries Monday, writing that it appears "the General Assembly does not appreciate the need to move promptly to cure the unconstitutional racial gerrymanders" in plans first approved in 2011.
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All three contend that partisan gerrymanders violate the First Amendment, not only because they dilute the voice of political factions but because they amount to retaliation against them for expressing their political views.
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Now the Wisconsin case is headed to a Supreme Court that has repeatedly said that extreme partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional, but has never found a way to decide which ones cross the line.
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To draw them, Republicans who had taken control of the Legislature after the 2010 elections hired a Republican political strategist, Thomas B. Hofeller, who was renowned for his skill in drafting partisan gerrymanders.
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And although earlier this week, a three-judge state court in North Carolina struck down North Carolina's legislative gerrymandering under that state's constitution, most other states with extreme gerrymanders haven't been as lucky.
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Still, the absence of Kennedy was felt as the court took tough stands on appeals from condemned inmates and rolled back precedent that had allowed lower federal court judges to review extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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But the judges on Monday set a September 1 deadline for state lawmakers to "adopt and enact remedial districting plans" after they had ruled last year that 28 legislative districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
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Opponents of partisan gerrymanders say, however, that time is fast running out in a nation that seems almost daily to grow more bitterly divided and less willing to follow the rules of political comity.
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In the Wisconsin case, the plaintiffs — a band of Democrats backed by local lawyers and an advocacy group, the Campaign Legal Center — seek to expand the one-person-one-vote principle to partisan gerrymanders.
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Election law experts have been particularly critical of recent gerrymanders in Republican-controlled states like North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but a lawsuit has also been filed against Maryland, where Democrats are in control.
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The three-judge panel's reliance on an opinion by Justice Elena Kagan -- which Chief Justice John Roberts had tried to undercut in the case last June -- represents a victory for challengers to partisan gerrymanders.
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Washingt (CNN)A state court in North Carolina unanimously struck down Republican-led efforts to maintain state legislative districts on Tuesday, holding that they amount to unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders that violate the state's Constitution.
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That's why these days you hear more about the evils of gerrymandering from Democrats and why Democrats are more enthusiastic than Republicans about the idea of trying to get courts to rule partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional.
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The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina found that Republicans had redrawn its map to favor their party after their first maps were struck down by the court as racial gerrymanders.
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Many voters have become more supportive of a nonpartisan approach to redistricting, following years of gerrymanders that carved up states into impregnable red and blue districts and led to more political polarization rather than cooperation.
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A parade of voting rights cases is headed for likely review by the Supreme Court — including challenges to gerrymanders in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas and a ruling against another restrictive voter law in Texas.
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Among the controversies the justices are likely to resolve in coming years are those testing partisan gerrymanders and voting districts; abortion rights and health care; and the reach of environmental, consumer and other regulatory protections.
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Measures like this could appeal to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who said in a 2004 case that he was open to the possibility of a standard that would allow the court to rule on partisan gerrymanders.
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Common Cause is just the latest in a series of court decisions and ballot initiatives that either undercut Republican gerrymanders or that seek to prevent either party from drawing similarly gerrymandered maps in the future.
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Republican congressional gerrymanders, in other words, did a great deal of their work in six swing states that President Obama won in 2012, but that also produced heavily Republican congressional delegations in the same year.
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The case is guaranteed a hearing by the Supreme Court, and it provides Democrats some hope of tamping down on the partisan gerrymanders that have handicapped their candidates since 2011, the last time districts were drawn.
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One of the most awaited, involving extreme partisan gerrymanders, could resolve whether the First Amendment prohibits legislators from discriminating against people from the opposing political party by drawing district lines based on voting patterns and views.
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Luckily, Mr Clement said, citing a suggestion from retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the problem is "largely self-healing", as voters will push for reforms and punish excessive gerrymanders by voting out governors who approve them.
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A three-judge district court panel ruled last August the districts were racial "gerrymanders," with boundaries drawn to diminish the voting power of minorities, and violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.
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In doing so, the justices left open the chance to revisit the matter in the future; the court could still establish a standard by which the judiciary can reverse undemocratic partisan gerrymanders at a later term.
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Among the high-profile cases that have been subject to hearings are those concerning a 40-foot "Peace Cross" monument on public ground in Maryland, the census lawsuit and partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Maryland.
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Another effort, Project REDMAP, an initiative of the Republican State Leadership Committee, was a national coordinating committee helping Republicans at the state level put together extreme partisan gerrymanders in the wake of their sweeping 2010 victories.
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A decision by the Supreme Court not to outlaw partisan gerrymanders could hasten the efforts already underway to challenge them in state courts — some state constitutions offer more favorable legal grounds than the national Constitution does.
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Despite Republican-led gerrymanders and the Democratic clustering in urban areas that tends to waste votes, Mr. Obama won around 211 of today's congressional districts while winning the national popular vote by seven points in 2008.
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But the most recent study, by a Princeton professor, Samuel S. H. Wang, concluded that gerrymanders had cost Democrats as many as 21 House seats in the 245 election — nearly enough to flip the chamber's control.
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The database of college students, who largely support Democratic candidates, could have proven valuable in 2016 and 2017, when parts of the state's political maps were found to be racial gerrymanders and had to be redrawn.
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Will the judges who tossed out the Ohio map—together with similar panels striking down gerrymanders in Wisconsin, Maryland, North Carolina and, most recently, Michigan—persuade the Supreme Court to finally take a stand against partisan redistricting?
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Teaming up with Justice Elena Kagan, who said a ruling against extreme partisanship could weed out "the worst of the worst" gerrymanders by putting legislators on notice, Justice Kavanaugh appeared to think a line might be drawn.
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A rising number of retirements, court rulings dismantling Republican gerrymanders, and falling behind in fundraising and candidate recruitment are a few ways Republicans are losing their advantage in the months before the 2018 midterm elections, per NYT.
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Since then, four court rulings have softened or even torn up Republican gerrymanders in four big states: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and most recently Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court struck down the congressional map last month.
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"It is suburban districts that are diversifying and were largely drawn in aggressive gerrymanders [in 22020] to just be safe enough with the assumption the bottom wouldn't fall out of the suburbs," a DCCC aide told Vox.
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Only after several conversations with a staff member there did she mention the hard drives in passing, she said, remarking almost jokingly that an expert on gerrymanders might find a lot in them that was of interest.
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In last month's case, Justice Elena Kagan reiterated what many consider to be the central problem: "Only the courts can do anything to remedy the problem, because gerrymanders benefit those who control the political branches," she wrote.
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"If Democrats win 2000, 000, 224 percent of the national House vote, we're likely to see Republicans hold onto control," Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law professor and an expert on gerrymanders, said in an interview.
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But few experts doubt that gerrymanders and restrictive voting laws will have a substantial impact in 2018, and strategists on both sides agree that Democrats have only a narrow path to capture a majority in the House.
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"The hope from the reform groups was that you would just be able to wave a wand over the entire country and fix all the gerrymanders," said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida expert on U.S. elections.
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While other state legislatures fight to retain gerrymandered political maps and enact voter-suppression schemes, California took the lead (under Schwarzenegger) in getting rid of gerrymanders, a movement Schwarzenegger himself is now trying to extend across the country.
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While the court has set a standard for unlawful racial gerrymanders, it has never come up with a test that goes to how much politics can play a role in the drawing of district lines after each census.
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While some Democrats were slow to catch up to the reality that targeted poll closures can lower turnout just as effectively as voter ID laws, gerrymanders, and voter purges, Republicans have known it and wielded it for years.
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The Supreme Court has struck down gerrymanders based on race, but never those based on party, largely because the justices could not agree on a legal standard that would let them distinguish illegally partisan maps from acceptable ones.
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"The court can construct a cause of action that reliably flags extreme partisan gerrymanders, while placing meaningful constraints on judicial intervention," the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law argued in its brief.
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So Democrats' best shot to try and roll back the state's Republican gerrymanders is to win the governor's race, in which former consumer financial protection bureau director Richard Cordray (D) is running against Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine (R).
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Reformers were once optimistic that the Supreme Court might act to curtail these kinds of partisan gerrymanders, but in a key case last year, former swing Justice Kennedy sided with the four more conservative justices to decline to act.
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Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court affirmed Monday a three-judge district court's finding that 28 state legislative districts drawn by the North Carolina legislature were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, but vacated the lower court's order for special elections in response.
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Yet groups like the Michigan Chamber of Commerce -- which has backed Republican gerrymanders in the past -- and Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette supported a lawsuit against the measure under the state constitution, seeking to kick it off the ballot.
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Under Chief Justice Roberts, the Court has struck down Voting Rights Act provisions that attempted to curtail gerrymanders along racial lines in the Shelby County case and removed restrictions on dark-money contributions in the infamous Citizens United ruling.
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For example, in Pennsylvania this year, the state Supreme Court threw out one of the most blatant partisan gerrymanders in the country on these grounds, and instituted a new map that hugely improved Democrats' chances to pick up House seats there.
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Two of the most politically charged cases awaiting resolution, testing 2020 census questions and partisan gerrymanders, could lead to decisions favoring Republican Party interests and reinforce the partisan character of a court comprising five GOP appointees and four Democratic ones.
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But Justice Elena Kagan predicted in her Whitford concurrence—which may have been the basis of a majority opinion, had Justice Kennedy leaned her way—that she and her colleagues "will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders".
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And even as she dissented in perhaps the most consequential case of the term -- which prevents judges from halting extreme partisan gerrymanders -- Kagan delivered a statement from the bench that was arguably her most passionate of a near-decade tenure.
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"This decision by Justice Kagan is a major victory for voting rights plaintiffs, who have succeeded in turning the racial gerrymandering cause of action into an effective tool to go after partisan gerrymanders in Southern states," he wrote on his blog.
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The backdrop: Two congressional and eight state legislative districts were ruled unconstitutional racial gerrymanders after a court said they violated the Voting Rights Act because lawmakers intentionally designed them to dilute the political power of minority voters who favor Democrats.
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The justices upheld an August 2016 ruling by the three-judge panel that the districts were racial "gerrymanders," with boundaries drawn to diminish the voting power of minorities, and violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.
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The opinion draws on fresh historical research to argue that partisan gerrymanders are not an accepted practice that the Founding Fathers chose to overlook, but a clear threat to the checks and balances at the heart of their new government.
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" Mr. Smith responded that if the court refuses to step in and stop extreme gerrymanders like Wisconsin's, "it may be that you can protect the court from seeming political, but the country is going to lose faith in democracy big time.
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The case could now go directly to the Supreme Court, where its fate may rest with a single justice, Anthony M. Kennedy, who has expressed a willingness to strike down partisan gerrymanders but has yet to accept a rationale for it.
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Tuesday's decision, issued unanimously by two Democratic judges and one Republican, appears to end a legal battle over the legislative maps that already had forced the redrawing of 28 districts that a federal court had found to be racial gerrymanders.
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Despite receiving only a minority of the total vote in some states, their gerrymanders enabled them to elect a majority of legislators in those states and also send a majority of the delegations from those states to serve in Congress.
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For the justices to side with the plaintiffs, experts say, they have to agree on standards for courts to separate constitutional from unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, an issue that to date has kept them from wading too far into the issue.
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That gives Evers the power to veto legislation seeking to maintain the GOP's gerrymanders in the next redistricting cycle (although there are whispers that Wisconsin Republicans are looking for a way to bypass Evers and enact new maps without his signature).
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Partisan gerrymanders, which often accompany racial ones, are thornier in the legal realm because while racial bias in redistricting is outright unlawful (racial minorities are specifically protected under the Constitution), the court has never found an unlawful incidence of partisan redistricting.
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In August, a federal appeals court found that district maps drawn by Republicans for the 2012 General Assembly elections included more than two dozen districts that were racial gerrymanders, and the court ordered lawmakers to redraw the maps next year.
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In redistricting challenges, Roberts voted not to block extreme political gerrymanders, which make it harder for the party that is out of power to win it back, and to dilute the power of minority voters, who tend to favor Democratic candidates.
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Among the disputes to be resolved before the traditional end-of-June deadline are those over a 40-foot "Peace Cross" on public ground in Maryland, partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Maryland, and a proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census.
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Her dissent walked readers through the meaning of political gerrymanders, the harm they do, and the rights they infringe on, and described how the Court could have responded had it not shown "nonchalance" about the damage that such schemes cause to our democracy.
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The court, therefore, sidestepped the salient question of whether federal judges may ever take up constitutional claims to the partisan gerrymanders proliferating across a polarized America, or determine how far politicians may or may not go in their quest to secure legislative majorities.
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But the decision will instead push federal courts further into the political thicket, and, in states with substantial minority voter populations, force courts to make logically impossible determinations about whether racial reasons or partisan motives predominate when a party gerrymanders for political advantage.
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Just as conservative justices in that case stepped in to stop what they saw as an overreaching Florida Supreme Court helping the Democratic candidate, the court's current conservatives may want to step in to stop state supreme courts from blocking Republican legislative gerrymanders.
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The swing vote on the issue would probably be Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., whom many voting-rights advocates see as the only prospect on the court — and a slim one, at that — for a fifth vote to outlaw partisan gerrymanders.
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That's a function of four factors: a perception that Democrats are shifting to the left; the undeniable strength of the overall economy; a kind of maxing out of exhaustion with Trump's behavior; and, of course, gerrymanders that have created structural advantages for Republicans.
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The Virginia amendment's passage is all the more important in the present moment, when voters everywhere have been left at the mercy of self-serving state lawmakers, thanks to the Supreme Court's refusal to intervene to stop even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders.
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The Supreme Court last month made democracy of the people, for the people, harder for the people to repair, ruling in a 5-to-4 decision that political gerrymanders — fueled by big data and designed by partisan operatives — are allowable under the Constitution.
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Democratic-linked plaintiffs in the case are likely to "prevail on the merits of this action by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the … congressional districts are extreme partisan gerrymanders in violation" of the state constitution's "Free Elections Clause," the court said.
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The 0003-page Michigan opinion, joined by two judges named to the bench by President Bill Clinton and one named by President George Bush, made a pointed and passionate argument to the justices for action to outlaw at least some partisan gerrymanders.
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While the Supreme Court has ruled on many aspects of the districting process — banning state legislative districts with unequal populations and banning districts intended to disenfranchise black voters — it has issued muddled opinions on the question of whether partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional.
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As Eric Levitz of New York magazine points out, large blue states will have to decide whether to engage in nonpartisan districting as a model or whether they will try to engage in the most aggressive pro-Democratic gerrymanders computer technology makes possible.
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To strike down these partisan gerrymanders, he only needs to enforce the First Amendment's guarantee, which protects the right to associate with the political party of one's choice and forbids the government from subordinating voters because of the political party to which they belong.
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So on June 18th, when the justices disposed of challenges to gerrymanders in Wisconsin (Gill v Whitford) and Maryland (Benisek v Lamone) on procedural grounds, without discussing the merits, many said the court was delaying a reckoning because Justice Kennedy had lost his will.
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Common Cause, preventing federal judges from reviewing extreme partisan gerrymanders: "It's very disheartening if you're in a district and you know that it's been rigged so no matter how you vote, it's going to come out for a certain party," she said Wednesday night.
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Also pending is a case pitting gay rights against religious interests, brought by a Christian baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for two gay men, and separate voting-district disputes from Wisconsin and Maryland testing the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders.
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"The evidence here is rock solid these are really egregious gerrymanders that are undermining our democracy," said Chris Warshaw, a political science professor at George Washington University who has provided expert testimony in local and federal gerrymandering cases in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.
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With important decisions looming in the remainder of a Supreme Court term that has been unusually quiet so far, there's little reason to expect surprises from the chief justice's votes on the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders or conscience-based opt-outs from anti-discrimination laws.
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The decision by the justices not to intervene in even the most blatant partisan gerrymanders was a letdown to many liberals in this evenly divided purple state, where substantive policy battles often feel overshadowed by knife-fighting over the rules that govern democracy itself.
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But as Justice Kagan is "sure" that she and her fellow justices "will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders", her opinion serves as a standing enticement to pull the 81-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee over to the liberals when the next opportunity arises.
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Beyond their legal significance, they arrive at a time when the Republican Party has gained near-unprecedented control of state governments and the House of Representatives — in part, Democrats and advocates of voting rights argue, by creating gerrymanders and voting laws that illegally hobble their opponents.
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"The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics," she wrote, in a passage that some election law experts said would make it easier to challenge asserted racial gerrymanders.
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Three state judges on a North Carolina trial court just did what a majority on the United States Supreme Court said was impossible only a few months ago — apply well-established legal standards to strike down some of the most egregious partisan gerrymanders in the country.
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"The District Court nevertheless asserted that partisan gerrymanders violate 'the core principle of [our] republican government' preserved in [Article I, Section 2], 'namely, that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around,'" Roberts wrote, referring to the lower court's finding that North Carolina's maps were unconstitutional.
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Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as United States solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, and who is among the lawyers representing Republican politicians urging the Supreme Court to reject extreme political gerrymanders, said it was important to take the long view and to act on principle.
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In 2012, he negotiated to save the Barack Obama-sponsored Affordable Care Act, but more in keeping with his conservative record, he has limited the reach of Voting Rights Act's protections, curbed campaign-finance regulations and closed the doors of federal courthouses to lawsuits over intense partisan gerrymanders.
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Tapping the brakes on both Republican and Democratic partisan gerrymanders on the same day in late June could allay the chief's worry (expressed in the Gill hearing) that the "intelligent man in the street" will think the Supreme Court "preferred" one party to the other when taking sides on partisan gerrymandering.
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This Tuesday, attorneys argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that partisan gerrymandering essentially strips Americans of their right to vote; specifically, voters in North Carolina and Maryland contend that political gerrymanders by state legislatures abridge their First Amendment rights by making it far more burdensome to organize and exercise political speech.
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Nationally, Republicans have denounced attacks on gerrymanders as assaults on their political power — understandably so, because the Republican landslide in 2500 allowed the party to redistrict its way to long-term control of Congress, with House seats far out of proportion to its share of the vote in many states.
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If what they want most is just a return to that liberal-dominated past, then they'll be inclined to embrace hyperpartisan ideas like the court-packing fancy that swept liberal Twitter recently, or to continue answering Republican House gerrymanders like the one attempted in Pennsylvania with the liberal equivalent that's operative in Maryland.
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If the state court holds that Republican gerrymanders violate the Constitution, I expect there will then be calls to get the Supreme Court of the United States involved, for example by arguing that the state court is interfering with the Legislature's constitutional prerogative to draw congressional district lines as it sees fit.
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"Clearly, the courts have realized that they do need to step in and police extreme partisan gerrymanders, and the court recognized that North Carolina's gerrymander was one of the most extreme in history," said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a lawyer representing some of the map's challengers.
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"You're seeing how much turmoil there is now in the lower federal courts, and how many federal judges believe the time has come for the courts to impose substantial limits" on partisan gerrymanders, said Richard H. Pildes, a scholar of the law of democracy at the New York University School of Law.
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Earlier Than You May Think • Five Ways Elizabeth Warren (and Other 2020 Hopefuls) Will Campaign When There's No Campaign Yet • Voting Issues and Gerrymanders Are Now Key Political Battlegrounds • About 150 migrants who tried to enter the United States near San Diego were forced back by American border officers using tear gas.
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But as long as we have single-member districts, and as long as Democrats concentrate in cities while Republicans live outside of the cities, any attempt to redraw districts to make them competitive would require awkwardly connecting slices of city to far-flung patches of country in ways that look even stranger and uglier than the current gerrymanders.
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The kind of advanced computing technology that had allowed extreme gerrymanders to become so effective could be turned against them: using complex algorithms, you could generate a huge number of potential districting plans, each of them taking into account a state's physical and political geography, and respecting its own "declared districting criteria"—omitting only the goal of partisan advantage.
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And in the House of Representatives, they are pressing a sweeping overhaul of election and ethics laws — titled H.R. 1 to underscore its importance — that would, among many other things, end partisan gerrymanders, disclose anonymous donors to political causes and reinstate crucial parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court invalidated in 2013.
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Among the most awaited cases are those testing whether the Trump administration may validly add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; whether judges will be allowed to curtail partisan gerrymanders that make it nearly impossible to unseat the controlling party in a state; and whether a 40-foot cross, a World War I memorial known as the Peace Cross, may remain on public land in Maryland.
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The next legal challenge to partisan gerrymanders likely will come next year from North Carolina, where a three-judge panel ruled in January that the state's 13 House districts were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander For voting-rights advocates, there is no better case to take to the Supreme Court: North Carolina's Republican-dominated legislature boasted openly that it had drawn the districts to achieve the maximum partisan advantage over Democrats.
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Some of these videos and articles might work well as a homework assignment to prepare students for the in-class activities below: About Gerrymandering in General Video: Gerrymandering: Crash Course Government and Politics (8 minutes) Video: Gerrymandering: How Drawing Jagged Lines Can Impact an Election | From Christina Greer (4 minutes) Video: Gerrymandering, Explained | From The Washington Post (3 minutes) About the Supreme Court Case Considering Wisconsin's Republican-Drawn District Map The Supreme Court will decide if the judicial branch should declare the worst partisan gerrymanders as unconstitutional, or if gerrymandering is a problem that only politicians — and not the courts — can resolve.
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