News Clips

"The Alabama legislature's defiance of a clear mandate from the Supreme Court to discriminate against Black voters is so brazen, a delaying tactic seems to be the only explanation that makes any sense," says Dan Vicuna, director of redistricting and representation at the advocacy group Common Cause. "I think it's not going to sit well with the Supreme Court," he says.

Jonathan Mehta Stein, the executive director of California Common Cause, which closely monitored the redistricting process, said he believed there was also a larger political goal: “They pulled her base out from under her to have her turn down the volume on behalf of renters,” he said.

The reform proposals that voters adopted during the last decade to stop gerrymandering were thwarted because redistricting remained in the hands of politicians, says Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer. Now, she’s supporting a new citizen initiative that would put an independent citizen commission in charge of mapmaking. She said states that redistricted through independent citizen commissions got legislative and congressional district lines that didn’t unfairly favor one party or another. “Ohioans put good rules into the Ohio Constitution, and those rules would have been adequate if elected officials had actually followed them rather than drawing lines that favored one political party,” says Turcer. “These folks are drunk on power. What do you do with someone who is drunk? You take away their keys.” Turcer, Miller, and others who back the upcoming proposal for an independent commission say legislative maps in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan became more competitive after they were drawn by an independent commission.

When I was in the Supreme Court last December listening to oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, I was struck by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions in this case that put the future of American democracy’s checks and balances at risk. Barrett doubted that the “independent state legislature theory” should give state legislatures absolute power to write laws for federal elections without facing state judicial review. And Barrett probed repeatedly about when, if at all, the Supreme Court should intervene in state court interpretations of state constitutions in these election cases.

Jay Heck, director of Common Cause, told the Wisconsin Law Journal he believes Vos’ threat of impeachment is hypocritical. “It’s such self-serving hypocrisy with Vos. Where was Vos in 2012 when conservatives all voted to dismiss illegal coordination with Walker and Club For Growth? It has been well documented that Walker engaged in coordination to raise money for his recall election, which was illegal. Candidates cannot coordinate with outside special interests, and the Legislature changed that in 2015, but I didn’t hear Vos, or conservative justices who received funding from Club for Growth, to recuse,” Heck said during an interview with the Wisconsin Law Journal. “It’s selective outrage,” Heck said, noting that Common Cause also held former Democrat Jim Doyle accountable for actions taken during his administration.

Regardless of how the state court rules, plaintiffs in an ongoing federal lawsuit plan to proceed with their case, explained Kathay Feng, an attorney and vice president of programs for Common Cause Florida, one of the groups challenging the map. "If they come to a final remedy that is very narrowly focused, there is still an opportunity for the federal case to examine the entire state map as a whole," Feng said. Although plaintiffs suing in state court have agreed to skip a trial, that's not expected to happen in the federal case, Feng said: "We are fully prepared to go to trial in September."