Supreme Court to review partisan redistricting

The Supreme Court has been reluctant to tackle partisan gerrymandering and sort through arguments about whether an electoral system is rigged or, instead, a party's political advantage is due to changing attitudes and demographics, as Wisconsin Republicans contend.

The court accepted a case from Wisconsin, where a divided panel of three federal judges previous year ruled that the state's Republican leadership in 2011 pushed through a plan so partisan that it violated the Constitution's First Amendment and equal rights protections. Similar cases are pending in North Carolina and Maryland.

In 2016, Lewis said at a meeting that he wanted the maps drawn "to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats". It split the court five different ways, with the bottom line being that the justices could not agree on a test to determine when normal political instincts such as protecting your own turned into an unconstitutional dilution of someone else's vote.

"Partisan gerrymandering of this kind is worse now than at any time in recent memory", said Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center, who will argue the case next fall.

The post Supreme Court could decide if gerrymandering can be too political appeared first on PBS NewsHour. State and federal legislative district boundaries are reconfigured every decade after the census so that each one holds about same number of people.

While it has regularly invalidated maps for improper racial gerrymandering, the Supreme Court, as noted above, has never struck down a map for excessive partisanship despite 31 years of precedent that partisan gerrymandering could theoretically be unconstitutional. The state is one of several battlegrounds where Republicans and Democrats fought to a virtual draw in last year's presidential election, but where Republicans enjoy election districts that have given them a almost 2-to-1 advantage in the state Assembly. Their Assembly lines were so effective that Republicans won a commanding majority in the chamber in 2012 even as Obama won Wisconsin by 7 points and Democratic legislative candidates won more votes statewide than Republicans did.

Democrats do likewise where they control the line-drawing process, such as in Illinois, Maryland and MA.

Wisconsin Republicans drew the maps in 2011 after they took full control of state government in the 2010 elections.

Partisan gerrymandering nationwide is more acute than ever before. Democrats won 56% of the vote but 71% of the seats where they controlled the process. It demanded that the legislature draw new district lines by this November.

The issue will be briefed and argued in the Supreme Court term that begins in October.

A three-judge court struck down the districts as an illegal partisan gerrymander and ordered new ones to be put in place for the 2018 elections. In the last case, four justices sought to curtail that role by declaring it a political question outside their jurisdiction. In that case and again in 2006, Kennedy didn't find one.

Two years ago, the court ruled that states can try to remove partisan politics from the process by creating commissions to take the job away from legislators.

The justices could say as early as Monday whether they will intervene.

"Partisan gerrymandering is always unsavory", Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent from the ruling against North Carolina's use of race. Democratic voters are clustered in cities such as Milwaukee and Madison, while Republican voters are more evenly spread across the state. Four others - only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer remain - said such challenges could be heard by the court but disagreed on the method.