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Thursday, April 29, 2004

Law - US Supreme Court upholds Pennsylvania redistricting plan

Here is the Washington Post coverage of yesterday's decision in Vieth v. Jubelirer. Some quotes:

A deeply divided Supreme Court yesterday upheld a redistricting plan that sought to give the Republican Party an edge in races for Pennsylvania's 19 congressional seats but refused to close the door on court challenges to such "partisan gerrymandering" in future cases.

A five-justice majority ruled that there is no objective way to determine whether the 2002 Pennsylvania redistricting plan, which a Republican-dominated state legislature devised and which produced GOP victories in 12 of the 19 districts, was so unduly influenced by politics that it denied Democrats their constitutional right of equal treatment under state law. As a result, the majority said, the court must bow out.

Referring to the 1986 Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Bandemer (declaring an Indiana legislative redistricting to be unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering), the story continues:
No "judicially manageable standards for adjudicating political gerrymandering claims have emerged," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas. Though a decision by the court in 1986 opened the door to court challenges against alleged partisan gerrymandering, Scalia wrote, the past 18 years of experience, in which no court has upheld such a challenge, shows that "political gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable and that [the 1986 decision] was wrongly decided."

The fifth member of the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed with Scalia that the Pennsylvania Democrats, who noted that the state now has a Republican-majority House delegation even though Democrats got most of the statewide vote for Congress, had failed to show how a court could decide that they had been the victims of unconstitutional gerrymandering.

But he said that did not mean a court could never figure out how much political gerrymandering is too much, and he refused to overrule the 1986 decision.

"I would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution in some redistricting cases," he wrote.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented, offering their views of how courts could formulate intelligible definitions of excessively partisan redistricting.

Here is the LA Times coverage of the decsion. Some quotes:
The 5-4 ruling is a major disappointment for liberal reformers who had hoped that the court would insist on fairness and equality in the political process.

They argued that elections are being "rigged" across the country so that politicians pick their voters, instead of the other way around.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats used their majorities in state legislatures to ensure that their party would maintain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Typically, they would draw district lines in a way that would lump Republicans into a few districts, leaving most with a comfortable majority of Democratic voters.

In recent years, and particularly since the 2000 census, Republicans have done the same. And thanks to more sophisticated computers, reformers say, state party officials can engineer the results long before the voters go to the polls.

Lawyers challenging this process had hoped the Supreme Court would rule that democracy requires elected representatives to reflect the will of most voters, not the line-drawing skill of the state lawmakers who control the process.

"Today's decision means that the courts have given up on trying to curb even the most outrageous partisan gerrymanders," said Tom Gerety, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. He cited Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Texas as examples of overly partisan line-drawing.

While the framers of the Constitution envisioned the House of Representatives as reflecting the will of the people, political scientists say that, today, it rarely reflects democracy in action. In 2002, for example, 99% of the House incumbents who sought reelection won.

Here is the NY Times article:
Holding the swing vote, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted with his conservative colleagues in saying that the Pennsylvania case did not violate the Constitution. But in a separate opinion, he declared that he was not willing to say as they did that no case would ever rise to that standard.

The lineup of the justices was the same as in the case that ended the recount in Florida after the 2000 election and essentially awarded the presidency to George W. Bush.

Several other redistricting cases are in the pipeline and may end up before the Supreme Court. If the court accepts a suit challenging State Senate and House districts in Georgia and decides it on the same ground as the Pennsylvania case, then Democrats would be the winners. But issues other than partisan gerrymandering are involved in the Georgia case, and it could be decided on different grounds.

The most conspicuous case is in Texas. A new map of Congressional districts was approved there last year at the urging of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. Republicans drew the new lines after they won full control of the Legislature, and they are expected to bring the party at least four new House seats in November.

Useful commentary on the opinion from SCOTUSBlog and from Election Law Blog.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 29, 2004 08:03 AM
Posted to General Law Related