Gerrymandering has been around as long as politics itself. And gerrymandering is baaaaaad. Unless of course it’s your side that’s doing it. Courts have long accepted that a certain amount of politics is going to be involved in redistricting, after all, it’s politicians drawing borders for political district lines, what could go right? Traditionally it has been the courts role to decide “how much is too much”. And that question is getting more and more of a judicial workout lately, and in a way that may fundamentally change the arcane art of gerrymandering as we know it.
The Republicans have nobody but themselves to blame for this mess, because they’re fat, ostentatious pigs. Driving a Porsche down I-80 attracts enough attention from motorists as it is, but driving it with the windows down, and the bass reverb rattling store windows ½ mile away tends to draw the attention of the state troopers too. Everybody already knows you’re rich if you drive a Porsche, you don’t have to rub everybody’s nose in it with the noise. This is what the GOP has done lately with their redistricting.
And they may have already fornicated the canine on one issue that will haunt them for a long time. Racial gerrymandering. For all of it’s flaws and deficiencies, people believe in the democratic system, they want to at least console themselves with the fact that their vote counts. But when you take every African American you can find, and compact them into two Rorschach test districts, like North Carolina did, you’re being a little too obvious. When people feel their voting rights are being abused, they tend to complain. And when enough of them complain, there will be somebody to take up the banner for them and file a lawsuit.
The Supreme Court decision in the North Carolina redistricting case is major, and it will have deep ramifications down the road for Republicans, for the simple reason that it gives lower federal courts guidance, and a judicial hook to hang their hat on. A lower court in March blocked Texas’ map for the 2018 elections, and with the SCOTUS ruling on the North Carolina case, it makes the chance of a Texas appeal being successful less likely, the appeals court now has precedent to back up the lower court ruling. It will also give federal circuit courts guidance in ruling on racial redistricting cases that may come up before them in the future. As they say on Wall Street, “Sometimes the bulls make money, sometimes the bears make money, but the pigs always get slaughtered”. The Republicans were a bit too porcine, and they got their heads handed to them.
But there is a second kind of gerrymandering, one that is, or at least has been, much more difficult for the courts to get a handle on, “partisan gerrymandering”. As I stated above, the courts expect a certain amount of politicization in the redistricting process, but again, how much is too much? There are two cases working their way up to the Supreme Court that could do for partisan gerrymandering what North Carolina did for racial gerrymandering, draw the line, and provide guidance to lower courts.
An excellent article on CNN.com chronicles the two cases that could change gerrymandering once and for all from the way it is now practiced. The first case comes to us courtesy of that GOP political sewage treatment plant, Wisconsin. The plaintiffs argument was novel, that the map discriminated against them by diluting the strength of their votes . It worked;
Last fall, a divided three-judge panel in Wisconsin held that the redistricting plan "was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters throughout the decennial period by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats."
The court accepted the plaintiffs' standard based in part on the new work of political scientists who used voting data to calculate the amount of bias against one party or another in the maps. (italics mine)
This is striking for a couple of reasons. First, the ruling itself. As we all know the whole idea of gerrymandering is to end up with more votes in a district than the other guy, but the court told the GOP basically that you can’t run up the score like Alabama playing Oakdale Community College on a Saturday afternoon. There’s that piggy thing again. The second thing is that the court considered evidence from the one thing that the Republicans hate more than even Democrats themselves. Nasty, icky science. I don’t even want to think about what kind of moon shot calculation spreadsheets and Orc based language the data wonks used to convince the court that they could empirically prove bias, but apparently it worked. The state of Wisconsin has of course appealed, but no word on a future court date in the article.
I don’t know why, but somehow or other it just didn’t surprise me to learn that the second case the SCOTUS is looking at comes once again from the “what, me cheat?” state of North Carolina;
Justices are also looking at another challenge to the North Carolina map that alleges an illegal partisan gerrymander.
A lower court denied a partisan gerrymander claim, but left the door open to future claims if plaintiffs did propose a standard. Supreme Court justices discussed the pending case behind closed doors last week.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why the Supreme Court would be talking about a lower court case that was denied, and that the article didn’t indicate had even been appealed, but maybe the SCOTUS figures “what the hell”, they’ve already slapped them once, maybe see if they need another smack to set them straight.
The impact of either one or both of these two cases, if heard by the Supreme Court and decided upon, is huge if the plaintiffs win out. As near as I can tell, it would do nothing to change the maps already in place, unless specific groups in specific states wanted to challenge their current maps in court, but it will place all 50 states on notice that the old Wild West days of drawing the damn map any old way you want because to the victors go the spoils is over. And the Republicans will have nobody to blame but themselves if it turns out that their pen has decidedly less slop to wallow around in.