WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court appeared divided on March 26 about separate legal challenges to the state electoral maps of North Carolina and Maryland, which partisans on both sides in those states say are unfairly tilted to their opponents.
Whatever the court decides to do—it could sidestep the controversies altogether by ruling the challenging parties lack legal standing to bring their cases—is likely to have an impact on the 2020 elections, including President Donald Trump’s reelection effort, and beyond.
The Supreme Court has reportedly never struck down an entire state map for gerrymandering—the partisan manipulation of the boundaries of electoral districts to favor one party or group—but it has ordered the redrawing of congressional districts.
Traditionally, conservative members of the court tend to favor treating redistricting as a political question that should be left to lawmakers who have been elected to make this kind of decision. Liberal justices tend to be more open to intervening in the map-drawing process to correct perceived injustices.
In the cases before the court, in the presidential battleground state of North Carolina, the legislature redrew the map in 2016, giving Republicans a 10 to 3 advantage over Democrats in the delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislature had to act because, at the urging of left-wing activist groups, a U.S. district court found the 2011 map amounted to an unconstitutional race-based gerrymander. A legislative committee made the new map based on seven criteria, including politics and race.
In the Maryland case, the map was also redesigned, providing Democrats a 7 to 1 advantage over Republicans in the liberal bastion’s congressional delegation. Although Republicans have not fared well in Maryland congressional elections for many years, they cried foul and sued.
‘Political Actors’
In the North Carolina case, Rucho v. Common Cause, attorney Paul D. Clement argued that the current redistricting system is not broken and that the court should not wade into this political controversy.“This court has repeatedly failed to identify a justiciable standard for partisan gerrymandering claims. The cause of that failure is not a lack of judicial imagination or a lack of claims that the particular map before the court was the most extreme ever,” Clement said.
“Rather, the root cause of this failure is the basic decision of the Framers to give responsibility for congressional districting to political actors. The Framers consciously chose to ... give the primary authority to state legislatures. And then, to police the possibility that state legislatures, which the Framers knew to be partisan institutions, would engage in too much partisanship, the Framers chose a structural solution, by giving the federal Congress supervisory authority.”
