Actually, it appears that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rubber-stamped a professor’s redrawing of Congressional districts in the state. Here’s the story:
Republicans probably just lost at least 4 or 5 seats in the House.
This afternoon, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unveiled its remedial Congressional map for the midterm elections in November. [See Featured Image] The Supreme Court Order issuing the map is here.
According to NYT data expert Nate Cohn, the new districts are arguably more advantageous to Democrats than the ones Democratic lawmakers themselves proposed a week ago. The map was actually drawn by Nathan Persily, a Stanford professor who is frequently retained by courts to “remedy” alleged gerrymandering…
Recall that on January 22, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled””on a party-line vote””that the districts adopted by the legislature in 2011 intentionally “diluted” the votes of Democrats, in violation of the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections. The court commissioned a new map, ordering that districts be “compact and contiguous” and avoid dividing localities. The Republican legislature was given three weeks to devise such a map and get the Democratic governor to sign off on it. If no agreement was reached, the court promised that it would adopt its own map by February 19.
The state Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. It declined to do so, with Justice Alito turning down a stay application without comment or referring it to the full court.
Chastened, the Republicans in the state legislature proposed new districts, and even though no one denied that their map conformed to the court’s neutral geographic indices, analysts determined that Republicans still intended for the map to help their party. Governor Tom Wolf rejected the proposal.
FiveThirtyEight elections expert Dave Wasserman explains that the court’s remedial map intentionally compensates for Democratic clustering in urban precincts.
The Supreme Court earlier declined to hear the case.
According to the NY Times (and in my opinion, this is the heart of the matter):
In general, partisan balance is not usually a goal when redistricting. You could certainly argue that partisan balance and maximizing the number of competitive districts should be among the criteria, but, in general, they are not. Instead, a nonpartisan map usually means a partisan-blind map. It strives for compact districts that respect communities of interest, with little regard for the partisan outcome.
…a partisan-blind map will tend to favor the Republicans by a notable amount.
That’s because Deomcrats tend to cluster in certain areas.
Gerrymandering is an old political tool, but ordinarily it refers to drawing very weird boundaries that defy logic except the logic of political partisanship. In other words, maps are drawn in very strange ways to create advantages for the winning party, who gets to draw them at certain times (usually according to the powers given the legislature by a state constitution). This is “fair” in the sense that to the winner belongs the spoils, and if a party wants to get to draw new districts it has to win. Either party can (and does!) do it when it is victorious.
The courts seem increasingly unhappy with that admittedly imperfect solution. One would think that the fix would be to draw districts with more normal lines—in other words, just as the Times states, a “partisan-blind map…striv[ing] for compact districts that respect communities of interest, with little regard for the partisan outcome.”
But, as the Times also points out, that tends to favor Republicans because of the Democratic-clustering effect. So, “partisan balance” had become a goal. This to me smacks of the judiciary taking over the function of a legislature—but hey, the judiciary has gotten more and more powerful in recent decades, hasn’t it?
That will be the basis of a GOP appeal:
Republicans say they’ll go to federal court this week to try to block new court-ordered boundaries of Pennsylvania’s congressional districts from remaining in effect for 2018’s elections.
Top Senate Republican lawyer Drew Crompton said Monday a separation of powers case will form the essence of the GOP’s argument. Crompton won’t say whether Republicans will go to a district court or the U.S. Supreme Court or what type of legal remedy they’ll seek.
But the case will involve making the argument the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures and governors, not courts, the power to draw congressional boundaries.
In my opinion, the outcome will depend on the political composition of the court in which the appeal is filed. Courts are almost always politically predictable these days. The original Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling establishing this was along straight political lines, as well.
