{"id":12361,"date":"2019-03-22T20:30:25","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T00:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/"},"modified":"2019-03-22T20:30:25","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T00:30:25","slug":"lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/de\/articles\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Lamone gegen Benisek: Frust \u00fcber Gerrymandering f\u00fchrte einen Mann vor den Obersten Gerichtshof"},"template":"","class_list":["post-12361","article","type-article","status-publish","hentry","article_type-blog-post"],"acf":{"details":{"summary":"Steve Shapiro was an engineer, a Democrat in Maryland, and a member of Common Cause. His frustration with his own state party and the way they gerrymandered district lines in 2011 led him to the U.S. Supreme Court.","featured_image":null,"article_type":1103,"authors":["{\"site_id\":\"1\",\"post_type\":\"person\",\"post_id\":12345}","{\"site_id\":\"1\",\"post_type\":\"person\",\"post_id\":12362}","{\"site_id\":\"1\",\"post_type\":\"person\",\"post_id\":12363}"],"related_issues":[103,2066],"related_work":false,"location":null},"sidebar":{"helper_enable_sidebar":false,"helper_media_contact":{"heading":"Media Contact","manually_enter_person":false,"person":null,"name":"","role":"","phone":"","email":""},"helper_links_downloads":{"heading":"Links & Downloads","links":null}},"page_layout":[{"acf_fc_layout":"layout_wysiwyg","_acfe_flexible_toggle":null,"component_wysiwyg":{"content":"The way Maryland state legislators had drawn Steve Shapiro\u2019s congressional district offended his democratic sensibilities.\r\n\r\nIt looked like two amoebas connected by a narrow tentacle.\r\n\r\nAnd it wasn\u2019t just his district, either. Maryland is one of the most gerrymandered states in the union, its congressional map carved up by Democratic leaders grabbing bits of population here and there and stitching them together into wild shapes in order to make each district\u2019s winner \u2013 typically the incumbent -- a foregone conclusion.\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n\r\nThe disrespect for the voters is what upset Shapiro the most. \u201cThe people are supposed to get to decide who their representatives in the House are going to be,\u201d he said in a recent interview. \u201cNot the other way around.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Shapiro did something really quite amazing. In 2013, despite his lack of any legal training, he wrote and filed a complaint<\/a> in federal district court on behalf of himself and two other state residents, on the grounds that Maryland\u2019s gerrymandering violated their constitutional rights.\r\n\r\nArguments in that case, which has been narrowed over time and now carries the name of only one of the original plaintiffs -- John Benisek, a Republican voter -- will be held before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, March 26, 2019.\r\n\r\nThe Court is considering both Lamone gegen Benisek<\/a> Und Rucho gegen Common Cause<\/a>, a case from North Carolina where Republican legislators drew the maps to favor their party. Lower courts have ruled district maps in both those cases to be unconstitutional. The High Court\u2019s decision will have profound implications for the future of gerrymandering reform.\r\n\r\nShapiro\u2019s personal quest to end gerrymandering in Maryland dates back to the early 1990s when the state legislature drew new district lines that separated him from adjacent neighbors and created a tiny corridor connecting his clump of voters to another clump in a distant part of another county. The reasoning was an open secret: \u201cThey did that so Mr. Hoyer could take what was in the middle,\u201d Shapiro said, referring to Steny Hoyer, the 20-term congressman who is currently House Majority leader, the second-most powerful Democrat in the country.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the past, it\u2019s been that kind of inside baseball \u2013 like protecting the incumbent,\u201d Shapiro said.\r\n

Next Level Activism: \"What Have I Got to Lose?\"<\/h3>\r\nShapiro, now 58, is an engineer by training, having served for many years in the Coast Guard and other government agencies. \u00a0He\u2019s a longtime member of Common Cause. And over the years, he wrote the occasional letter about gerrymandering, made the occasional phone call.\r\n\r\nBut the 2011 redistricting really set him in motion. There was still some of the old-style gerrymandering at work \u2013 Rep. Hoyer kept the voters he wanted, for instance -- but this redistricting had an overtly partisan motivation as well: It broke up a reliably Republican district in western Maryland. The goal was to change the makeup of the state delegation from six Democrats and two Republicans to seven and one \u2013 not because voters had voted differently, but because the lines were moved.\r\n\r\n\u201cI figured: \u2018OK I don\u2019t like this,\u2019 \u201d Shapiro said. \u201cSo then I started looking at the Constitution and thinking: \u2018Well, that has to be unconstitutional.\u2019 I thought I saw just on my own uneducated reading that there were some points in the Constitution that I thought would address this. So I figured \u2018What have I got to lose? Maybe I\u2019ll write this up.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere were three parts of the Constitution that seemed particularly relevant to Shapiro.\r\n\r\nFirst, there was Article 1, which establishes that members of the House of Representatives will be \u201cchosen\u2026 by the People\u201d \u2013 not vice versa. \u201cThe Equal Protection Clause sounded good to me, too,\u201d Shapiro said.\r\n\r\nBut what eventually got Shapiro\u2019s case all the way to the Supreme Court was his claim that gerrymandering also violates the First Amendment by abridging the freedom of speech \u2013 in this case, punishing voters who voted Republican by making their votes ineffective.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a good argument: The fact that the government is not allowed to favor or disfavor citizens based on their political views,\u201d Shapiro said.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s also, as Shapiro noted in his filing, an argument that was essentially invited by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his concurrence<\/a> in a 2004 case, Vieth v. Jubelirer<\/em>. In that case, the Court delivered a fractured opinion, dismissing a Pennsylvania gerrymandering lawsuit that had been brought primarily under the Equal Protection Clause. But Kennedy made a suggestion.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe First Amendment may be the more relevant constitutional provision in future cases that allege unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering,\u201d he wrote.\r\n\r\n\u201cFirst Amendment concerns arise where a State enacts a law that has the purpose and effect of subjecting a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment by reason of their views. In the context of partisan gerrymandering, that means that First Amendment concerns arise where an apportionment has the purpose and effect of burdening a group of voters\u2019 representational rights.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf a court were to find that a State did impose burdens and restrictions on groups or persons by reason of their views, there would likely be a First Amendment violation, unless the State shows some compelling interest.\u201d\r\n

Already Won Once<\/h3>\r\nShapiro\u2019s case, as it happens, has already made it to the Supreme Court twice and won a unanimous verdict the first time \u2013 on a technicality. The original lawsuit was thrown out by a federal judge in 2014. That decision was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. But Bundesgesetz<\/a> as interpreted by the Supreme Court has long required that any non-frivolous challenge to the constitutionality of the apportionment of congressional districts be heard by three judges, serving on a panel, not just one.\r\n\r\nAn actual lawyer had stepped in to be lead attorney in the case by that point: Michael Kimberly, then an associate and now a partner in the Supreme Court practice of the Washington, D.C., law firm Mayer Brown.\r\n\r\nKimberly and Shapiro appealed the 4th Circuit decision -- and the Supreme Court einstimmig entschieden<\/a> in their favor in 2015, stating that the three-judge requirement \u201ccould not be clearer.\u201d\r\n\r\nKimberly then narrowed the case to center around the First Amendment argument and the single most brazen change in the map: The destruction of the 6th District in rural western Maryland as a Republican stronghold. The 2011 redistricting swapped out over 360,000 residents for a similar number of voters from the liberal Washington, D.C., suburb of Montgomery County, flipping the district from red to blue.\r\n\r\nShapiro, a registered Democrat who now lives in solid-blue Bethesda, dropped out of the case as a named litigant in late 2016.\r\n\r\nWhen the renamed case was heard by a three-judge panel in November 2018, the panel threw out Maryland\u2019s congressional map, sending the case back to the Supreme Court, this time for a ruling on its merits.\r\n\r\nCommon Cause, which had previously supported Shapiro as an amicus curiae, wrote in a 2018 brief to the Supreme Court<\/a> on the Lenisek case that \u201cThe dismemberment of Maryland\u2019s Sixth Congressional District is a textbook partisan gerrymander by this Court\u2019s own definition.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd quoting the opinion from a 1968 Supreme Court case<\/a>, the Common Cause brief notes that the right to join a political party \u201cfor the advancement of political beliefs, and the right of qualified voters, regardless of their political persuasion, to cast their votes effectively . . . rank among our most precious freedoms . . . protected by the First Amendment.\u201d\r\n

Engineering the Law<\/h3>\r\nAs for Shapiro, after 30-plus years working as an engineer, filing his case inspired him to enroll in law school. He graduated from the George Washington University Law School last May.\r\n\r\n\u201cI figured I had so much fun doing this myself pro se <\/em>-- doing the research and writing this up \u2013 that maybe I could learn to do this for real,\u201d Shapiro said.\r\n\r\nAnd he\u2019s still following his case \u2013 along with the companion North Carolina case \u2013 very closely. \u201cI still feel a sense of ownership there,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nLast year, he worked with Dean Alan Morrison of the George Washington University Law School, who filed an Amicus Curiae-Schriftsatz<\/a> on Shapiro\u2019s behalf in what used to be his case. Among other arguments, he reprised his original concern about Article 1 of the Constitution. Its language, he wrote, \u201crequires that members of the House be chosen by \u2018the People\u2019 but the legislature of the State of Maryland, by its gerrymandering being challenged in this case, has drawn the district lines so that it, not the People, effectively decide who will be their Representatives in Congress.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Shapiro also worked with Michael Geroe, a long-time friend and member of the Supreme Court Bar, to file an Amicus Curiae-Schriftsatz<\/a> In Rucho gegen Common Cause<\/em>, as well. In that brief, he notes that the Maryland General Assembly actually passed a bill in 2017 that would have turned redistricting over to a nonpartisan commission, effectively ending the state\u2019s long tradition of gerrymandering \u2013 but only if five other states, including North Carolina, joined in a compact to do the same. The bill was considered a bit of a stunt and was vetoed by the governor.\r\n\r\nBut, Shapiro wrote, \u201cNorth Carolina and Maryland already have such a compact -- the United States Constitution.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n "}}]},"yoast_head":"\nLamone v Benisek: A Frustration with Gerrymandering Led One Man to the Supreme Court - Common Cause<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/de\/artikel-2\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lamone v Benisek: A Frustration with Gerrymandering Led One Man to the Supreme Court\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/de\/artikel-2\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Common Cause\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/CommonCause\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/CC-Share-Graphic-Main9.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@CommonCause\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/lamone-v-benisek-a-frustration-with-gerrymandering-led-one-man-to-the-supreme-court\/\",\"name\":\"Lamone v Benisek: A Frustration with Gerrymandering Led One Man to the Supreme Court - 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