Associated Press: Democrats face worsening legal environment on redistricting

Associated Press: Democrats face worsening legal environment on redistricting

Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps. “If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”

After New York state’s top court this week crushed Democratic hopes of coming out ahead in this decade’s redistricting cycle, the party faces an increasingly precarious legal environment in the hyper-partisan battle over drawing legislative lines.

New York’s Court of Appeals on Wednesday overturned a map that Democrats muscled through the state legislature there, deciding that a nonpartisan expert will instead draw the lines for the state’s 26 congressional districts. It was at least the fifth time this cycle a state court has ruled that maps drawn by its state legislature were too partisan, with a Democratic map in Maryland also falling and Republican-drawn ones in Kansas, North Carolina and Ohio being tossed out as well.

Still, Republicans are favored to win state Supreme Court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November that’d enable those GOP-controlled legislatures to implement more partisan maps before 2024. In contrast, the 4-3 New York decision came from a court appointed entirely by Democrats, a party that now finds itself bound to a bipartisan process written into the state’s constitution. …

The recent flurry of state court actions are due to a legal ruling at the tail end of the last redistricting cycle. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that federal courts have no role in policing partisan gerrymanders, or maps drawn explicitly to benefit one party by contorting lines to capture enough of its voters to reliably win elections. …

There’s even more uncertainty over the legal landscape of redistricting this cycle because the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has indicated it may rewrite the rules that govern the drawing of legislative districts. In February, conservatives on the court said they may revise the standards on how to draw districts that comply with the Voting Right Act’s requirement that minorities get a chance to choose their own representatives and are not simply scattered among voters of other races. And in March, four conservative justices indicated they wanted to consider Republican lawyers’ arguments that only state legislatures — and not state courts — have the say in drawing congressional maps.

Still, redistricting reformers said they remain heartened by how courts performed in this cycle so far. Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps.

“If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”