Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.
Joan Biskupic on the Rucho case:
The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas, with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states, was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court, declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.
Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts – drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests – to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against challenges to partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting.
“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” dissenting justices warned in 2019, “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
That decision in Rucho v. Common Cause has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy. The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court’s decision last year in Trump v. United States, which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines).
And speaking of Common Cause...
The nation’s most prominent anti-gerrymandering organization is in the midst of a tense internal debate over whether to modify its position opposing all partisan redistricting, a remarkable development in response to a gerrymandering war that has broken out across the nation.
It’s a sign that after two decades of hard-won progress against partisan line-drawing, the movement is facing an existential crisis.
Common Cause has fought to bar gerrymandering through laws, referenda, and constitutional amendments for decades, battling both Democrats and Republicans in red and blue states to adopt measures to restrain lawmakers from drawing district lines that advantage their own party.
But on Monday night, after a meeting by the organization’s national governing board, the group’s president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón emailed organization leaders asking them not to make any new statements on gerrymandering until the board issued further guidance, which she said would come later this week. The request to stand down comes as Democrats in California are pushing to temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission to allow them to draw five or more new Democratic-leaning House districts. The move – which would undo anti-gerrymandering reforms that Common Cause helped make law in 2010 – is a response to Republicans’ aggressive mid-decade push to redraw state maps in Texas and elsewhere in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“While IRCs [independent redistricting commissions] remain our gold standard and will continue to be our position, the board is currently considering options as to how we will respond under these highly unusual circumstances,” Ms. Solomón wrote in an email to the group’s leaders that was read to the Monitor by two separate sources who had received it.
“It’s certainly an inflection point for our organization,” one Common Cause staffer told the Monitor.
