Marcia Coyle on Roberts, Kennedy and Gerrymandering

The prospect of winning a large damages award in a class action can be the only way for workers to find lawyers to take their cases, they argue. The liberal justices grappled for a workable standard for judges to follow when analyzing whether a state’s maps gave such an advantage to one political party over the other that it violated the Constitution. This was after Democrats won 51% of the vote Republicans won 48 % in Wisconsin’s 2012 election.

Rave said it’s a way of looking at the way votes translate into seats.

Some Wisconsinites decided this crossed the line from routine partisan activity to something more sinister.

Pennsylvania is often cited as one of the worst offenders of partisan gerrymandering.

A state judge said Wednesday his court was unlikely to decide a civil case challenging the constitutionality of the state’s congressional district maps in time to affect next year’s elections. In 2010, however, Republicans won control of both houses of the Legislature and the governorship and produced a redistricting plan. In most states, the legislature controls redistricting. Unsurprisingly, these states seem to draw more competitive districts.

This, then, may be the plaintiffs’ best hope in the gerrymandering case.

Contemporary gerrymanders can compound Democrats’ geography-driven disadvantages. Whether it’s a Democratic district or a Republican district, using this map, the result is preordained in most of the districts. This probably contributes more to polarisation than gerrymandering does.

Religious Discrimination – in two cases that will determine whether President Trump’s Muslim travel and refugee ban exceeds his power under federal immigration laws and violates the First Amendment (note that the case is now off the argument calendar while the parties hash out how Trump’s newest policy affects the case). He said that partisan gerrymanders result in a violation of the “Equal Protection Clause by discriminating against the targeted party’s voters” and preventing them from “fair and effective representation”. North Carolina’s map gives Republicans ten seats and Democrats three, despite close statewide votes. When asked by Justice Sonia Sotomayor what value gerrymandering has for democracy, the lawyer representing Wisconsin’s lawmakers responded by noting that gerrymandering “produces values in terms of accountability that are valuable so that people know who is and who isn’t in power”.

A registered Democrat, retired University of Wisconsin Law School professor William Whitford, sued, claiming his vote as a Democrat didn’t count as much as a vote by a Republican because the district lines watered down his party’s power.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said a ruling favoring the employers in the case could cut out “the entire heart of the New Deal” and unravel the construct of labor relations that began under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to The New York Times. In 1986, the court said a political gerrymander could conceivably be justiciable, but it has never discovered what Justice Anthony Kennedy terms “a manageable standard”. By making it likely that a higher percentage of votes for the party’s candidates will be “wasted” than of votes for the other party’s candidates.

Efficiency gap is a serious situation where the number of votes gets wasted due to extreme gerrymandering. “And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state”, Roberts added.

Acting Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff, though a Republican, voted with Laney for more balanced legislative redistricting. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts called those metrics “sociological gobbledygook”.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Paul Smith, urged the justices to act. And he questioned the social science relied upon by the challengers, calling it “gobbledygook”. At one point, he asked one of them to imagine that a state passed a law saying its election maps will always “favor party X or party Y. Is that constitutional?” he asked.

A decision by the court next year could trigger legal challenges to congressional maps across the country. Different states are free to experiment with different approaches.

Research by ILR School professor Alexander J.S. Colvin showing that mandatory arbitration is more widespread than previously thought was cited in U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments October 2.