WASHINGTON, D.C. – For months political observers have been interested in how the U.S. Supreme Court would approach the issue of gerrymandering, specifically partisan gerrymandering cases in Wisconsin and Maryland. Decisions on those cases would have been informative for North Carolinians looking for resolution on its own gerrymandering case working through the courts. WOULD have been, because SCOTUS just sidestepped the legal question altogether.
“The rulings in the separate cases once again put off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional. But the court again left open a path for such challenges.
It was a technical resolution of what has seemed to hold the promise of being a landmark decision about extreme efforts to give one party advantage over another.
While the court routinely polices the drawing of electoral maps to combat racial gerrymandering, it has never found that partisan efforts went too far. It has never settled on a test that judges could use to determine how much politics was too much.
The practical impact of the case is that legislation elections in Wisconsin this year will be conducted using the map challengers said overwhelmingly favors Republicans. The Maryland congressional districts will also remain the same, including the district that challengers said was drawn to elect a Democrat.”
North Carolinians that have been subjected to years of rhetoric and lawsuits from the Left about gerrymandering and the narrative that it is only racist and power-hungry Republicans that engage in such trickery.
If the decades of gerrymandering history in North Carolina under Democrat control weren’t enough, maybe the Maryland case of partisan maps to reelect Democrats will poke a hole in that narrative.
“A pending challenge of North Carolina’s redistricting efforts could provide another case for the justices to consider the issue. In that battleground state, Republicans control 10 of 13 congressional districts. That case has plaintiffs challenging each district.”
Still, it looks like it will be more waiting on whether or not partisan gerrymandering, a practice as old as representative government, will be ruled on.
Read more about the SCOTUS decision here.
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