News Clips

"When politicians draw lines that lock in the winners for the rest of the decade, it creates a disillusionment among voters that elections may not matter, because our voices won't be heard," said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the good government group Common Cause. And without the political middle represented in Congress, "you end up with a dysfunctional body," she said.

The fight for voting rights goes on, even though every Senate Republican, joined by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), tried to shut it down on January 19. They refused to adjust a Senate rule best known for obstructing civil rights legislation. The filibuster rule – requiring 60 votes to advance most legislation if any senator objects – has been modified or waived more than 160 times in recent decades. Just in December, an exception was granted for legislation dealing with the debt ceiling, with the support of Manchin and Sinema and some Republicans. Yet somehow they decided voting rights were not important enough to warrant any adjustments to the rule.

Henry Coxe III, an attorney for Common Cause Florida and Fair Districts Now, contended the Florida Constitution does not provide the governor with the right to ask the court to advise him whether he should veto a hypothetical congressional redistricting bill. “Any other result would implicate the constitutional principle of separation of powers by entangling the (Supreme) Court in the legislative drafting process,” Coxe wrote. “This request seeks an advisory opinion purportedly to inform his possible, hypothetical, exercise of his legislative veto power on a bill that has not yet been drafted, much less passed by both houses of the Legislature or presented to the governor for signing,” Coxe wrote. “In this context, it is well-settled that the governor’s query about his veto power asks about a legislative function not susceptible to an advisory opinion. Such a request for guidance from this court before a bill is passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor is improper.”

Catherine Turcer, director of Common Cause Ohio and a longtime anti-gerrymandering advocate, praised the ruling. "Today's ruling is clear: gerrymandered maps have no place in the state of Ohio," Turcer said in a statement. "Now that the Ohio Redistricting Commission is back to square one, we ask that they finally stop and listen to the voters' demands for a fair redistricting process."

“Today’s ruling is an unequivocal win for North Carolina’s Black voters who were most harmed by this extreme partisan gerrymander,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a statement. Riggs represented Common Cause. “At every level, North Carolina’s GOP leadership diluted representation of communities of color to entrench their own political power in ways that were both obvious and egregious,” her statement said.

Attorney Allison Riggs, who is representing plaintiff Common Cause in the redistricting case, says that even though the state constitution doesn’t explicitly require fair elections, case law clearly does. “I’ve certainly studied the history,” she said, “and there is not a suggestion anywhere that the failure to put ‘fair’ in the constitution means that there's a presupposition that elections will be run unfairly.” Riggs says constitutional provisions have to be understood together in context. “In cases interpreting free elections, there's frequently also an equal protection claim associated with that that really talks about how we have to treat people equally and fairly,” Riggs said. “Sometimes you can miss the forest for the trees.”