Washington – In June 2019, the Supreme Court leaves aside the idea that federal courts could control the power of state legislators to attract legislative maps designed mainly to strengthen the power of their own party.
The ruling, a 5-4 division along ideological lines with conservative judges in most, made it clear that partisan Gerrymandering was here to stay, the absent states took matters in their own hands or the unlikely scenario of the intention of the Congress to impose some kind of national prohibition.
When writing for most, the president of the Supreme Court John Roberts simply said that federal courts had no authority to intervene on the subject, even if that means that electoral results may “seem unfair.”
With the technological advances that make it easier to draw districts surgically to maximize partisan advantages, both republican and democratic states have continued the practice.
That is now in view in Texas, since Republicans plan to re -draw Maps from Congress to extend their domain in the State and isolate against possible democratic profits throughout the country in the mid -period of the 2026 period, which will determine the control of the House of Representatives during the last two years of the term of President Donald Trump.
That has led the Democrats in California and other states to threaten the countermeasures.
“This is a very ugly career towards the bottom,” said Richard Pildes, an expert in electoral law at the Law Faculty of the University of New York, who has advocated the reform. With the control of the house so finely balanced, Texas has the incentive of “squeezing each district they can,” he said.
The legal background of the redistribution of districts
According to the Constitution, state legislatures have the main role of attracting legislative maps, but Congress has the specific power to intervene if it chooses and establishes rules on how it should be done.
States must draw new legislative maps after the census that takes place every 10 years.
Texas and all other states have already drawn new maps after the 2020 census. The last saga was requested when Governor Greg Abbott proposed a re-Draw of the mid-decade to obtain open political profits, promoted by Trump.
The states are not forbidden to draw new maps between censuses, but it is rarely done.
Texas is “crossing the rules that kept people under control,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, lawyer of the American Union of Civil Liberties that works in vote rights cases.
Despite the decision of the Supreme Court in the partisan Gerrymandering dispute, there are some restrictions on how states attract the districts.
According to the precedent of “a person, a vote” of the Supreme Court, the populations of each district must be similar so that the power of each individual voter is not diluted.
Another restriction, at least for now, is the reference voting rights law, a law approved 60 years ago this week to protect minority voters.
But the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority 6-3, has weakened that law in a series of rulings.
A decision in 2013 destroyed a key provision that required certain states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain the approval of the federal government before changing state -voting laws, which included the adoption of new district maps.
Last week, the Court indicated that the Voting Rights Law could further weaken in a case that involves the districts of the Louisian Congress.
The court said that it would consider whether it is unconstitutional, under amendments 14 and 15, that the states consider the breed in the drawing districts destined to comply with the voting law.
A decision in that sense would be “potentially devastating for voting rights,” said Lakin, who is involved in the case.
The Trump administration has already suggested support for this type of legal argument in a letter that sent to Texas officials, suggesting that the current map is unconstitutional because it was drawn along racial lines, partly to comply with the Voting Rights Law.
Meanwhile, the current map in Texas is still being challenged in court by civil rights groups that allege that the Voting Rights Law violates.
Amid the tendency towards partisan line drawing, some states have undertaken efforts to depolitize the process establishing commissions instead of allowing legislators to do work. There are 18 commissions of some kind, although only eight of them are truly independent.
The Supreme Court confirmed by little the use of independent commissions in a ruling of 2015. The composition of the court has changed since then, which means that it is not clear if it would reach the same conclusion now.
Meanwhile, when California Democrats rush to cancel their District Redistribution Commission in response to the Texas Plan, it can have less political sense for states to establish commissions in the future.
“Drastically the incentives to create commissions,” said Pildes.
At the time of partisan group Gerrymandering, liberal judge Elena Kagan warned about the consequences of the decision of the Supreme Court not to intervene on Gerrymander maps in North Carolina and Maryland.
“The practices challenged in these cases prevent our system of government,” he wrote. “Part of the role of the Court in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than the free and fair elections.”
