Supreme Court indecision may help Michigan anti-gerrymandering proposal

At first blush, the Supreme Court’s decision today to duck the issue of gerrymandering seems a setback for reformers hoping for a landmark ruling that could change the landscape of American politics.

The high court ruled unanimously that anti-gerrymandering legal challenges brought by Democrats in Wisconsin and Republicans in Maryland should be sent back to the lower courts. In essence, a non-decision decision.

The court has consistently balked at drawing a line that indicates an intolerable level of partisanship when politicians draw district lines. One of the nation’s top analysts of Supreme Court decisions was perplexed by the justices’ narrow ruling on technical issues.

“The Supreme Court has kicked this can down the road for the umpteenth time in almost 50 years, unable to come up (with) a rule to determine how much politics is too much in drawing district lines,” said Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court expert and publisher of the SCOTUSblog website. “And there’s no good sign that an answer is coming anytime soon.”

A group of current and former moderate Republican officeholders — including former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and former U.S. senators Bob Dole and Alan Simpson — signed on with the challengers’ lawsuits. They said partisan gerrymanders enable politicians to choose their voters instead of letting voters elect their politicians, contributing to partisan gridlock in Congress.

Schwarzenegger said that the court’s action was not “the end of the war for fair districts,” but a call for further action.

Katie Fahey, founder and director of Voters Not Politicians, the volunteer group seeking to put redistricting reform on Michigan’s November ballot, agreed that SCOTUS’ reticence may provide a boost to their cause.

“The United States Supreme Court’s move to sidestep the decision on partisan redistricting and send it back to the states in cases involving Wisconsin and Maryland reinforces the need for the Voters Not Politicians proposal here in Michigan,” Fahey said in a statement earlier today. “Ultimately, this is a decision that voters will have to make on November 6. Voters Not Politicians stands with the majority of Michigan voters who believe the process for drawing district lines should be fair, impartial, and transparent.”

Heading into today’s long-awaited decision, the unfairness of the redistricting processes in Wisconsin and Maryland seemed fairly obvious.

Though Wisconsin voters are about equally divided along party lines, the newest map drawn by GOP leaders gave Republicans control of two-thirds of the state Assembly seats.

In Maryland, Republican voters challenged the redrawing of Maryland’s 6th Congressional District that emerged in 2011, which gave Democrats a seat in the U.S. House that a Republican, Roscoe Bartlett, held for two decades. Bartlett was re-elected by a 28 percent margin in 2010. After the redistricting, he lost by a 21 percent margin.

The Supreme Court said the voters in these two states lacked standing to challenge the state’s entire map and remanded the case back down to the lower court to give them an opportunity to prove how they were injured.

In delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the plaintiff’s alleged harm — the dilution of their voting power — is an injury that is specific to their voting district.

“Remedying the individual voter’s harm, therefore, does not necessarily require restructuring of all the state’s legislative districts,” he said.

It seems almost unfathomable that the court does not acknowledge that fixing the partisan bias in some districts does not require revamping numerous squiggly district lines and making changes that affect a state’s entire legislative map.  The domino effect of creating square, compact districts is fairly obvious.

Cases challenging Ohio’s zig-zagging boundaries, plus a North Carolina case still pending before the high court, could still result in a ruling that hyper-partisan redistricting is unconstitutional. But with SCOTUS punting the Wisconsin and Maryland cases, there will not be any definitive rulings in 2018.

In the meantime, that puts the issue in the laps of voters at the state level.

In Michigan, a Republican group supporting the status quo continues to challenge the validity of the Voters Not Politicians ballot language. The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that the redistricting reforms are qualified to be on the November ballot.

But the opponents of the proposal have appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court. The Voters Not Politicians leadership anticipates that the ballot language will be approved by the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers on Wednesday. They’re hoping the GOP-majority Michigan Supreme Court will clear the way for a November vote in the coming weeks.

“The U.S. Supreme Court is leaving it up to states to decide how they will address what President Ronald Reagan called a ‘great conflict of interest’ that exists when politicians draw congressional and legislative districts, as they do here in Michigan,” Fahey said.

“Our proposal would fix our current redistricting system, where politicians and lobbyists operate behind closed doors to manipulate district lines for partisan purposes. Our solution brings redistricting out into the open, putting an independent citizens redistricting commission of voters in charge of drawing maps that cannot give a party, candidate or incumbent an unfair partisan advantage.”