Liberal justices think it is a threat, and conservatives wonder whether courts have a role in policing it.
By Robert Barnes Robert Barnes Reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court Email Bio Follow March 26 at 1:35 PM A familiar pattern repeated itself at the Supreme Court Tuesday as it again took up the subject of extreme partisan gerrymandering: Liberal justices saw it as a threat to democracy that requires action while conservatives wondered how courts could ever decide when a political process becomes too political.
If technology has made thousands of potential maps available to state lawmakers who draw the districts, conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked, “How do you determine whether that choice is constitutional?” He added: “It’s a real puzzle to me.” A reconfigured court was considering the issue Tuesday. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who suggested that some political gerrymandering could be so extreme that it was unconstitutional but had never settled on a test, has been replaced with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The new justice is generally more conservative but has not ruled on the issue in the past.
“Does one person have one vote that counts equally with others if the impact of her vote is reduced based on her party affiliation?” she asked. The Maryland case was not new to the justices. In June, they said it was not ready for them and sent it back. In November, a unanimous three-judge panel found that Democrats had unconstitutionally targeted Republican voters in the 6th Congressional District because of their past votes. The legislature had redrawn the district, which previously stretched across the top of the state, to dip down into Democratic strongholds in the Washington suburbs.
The North Carolina legislature “drew a plan designed to subordinate the interests of non-Republican voters not because they believe doing so advances any democratic, constitutional, or public interest, but because, as the chief legislative mapdrawer openly acknowledged, the General Assembly’s Republican majority ‘think[s] electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,’ ” wrote Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
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