New York’s top court this week ruled against Democratic hopes of winning the redistricting process. The party now faces a more uncertain legal environment in its hyper-partisan fight to draw legislative lines.
Wednesday’s decision by New York’s Court of Appeals to overturn a map that Democrats had manipulated throughThe state legislature in Maryland decided that a nonpartisan expert would draw lines for the 26 congressional districts. This was at most the fifth time in this cycle that a state court ruled that maps drawn in its state legislature were too partisan. A Democratic map in Maryland was also thrown out, while Republican-drawn maps in Kansas, North Carolina, and Ohio were also tossed out.
However, Republicans are expected to win the North Carolina and Ohio state Supreme Court elections in November. This would allow GOP-controlled legislatures in those states to implement more partisan maps prior to 2024.The 4-3 New York decision was decided by a court that was entirely composed of Democrats. This party now finds itself bound to a bipartisan process as written into the state constitution.
Lakshya Jin, a lecturer from the University of California Berkeley who writes on redistricting at Split Ticket, said that Democratic judges aren’t as inclined to allow extreme partisan gerrymandering. Jain pointed out that Democrats have been pushing for redistricting reforms and anti-gerrymandering legislation for a long time. This is reflected in their judges’ preferences.
Florida is where the biggest test of potential legal asymmetry will be. Democrats and civil right groups are challenging a congressional grid that Republican Gov. Rick Scott has drawn. Ron DeSantis was instrumental in bringing this aboutThe GOP-controlled legislature is there. Initial objections by legislators were to the map which favors their party. It also dismantles two plurality Black districts in possible violation the Fair Districts Amendment. This amendment requires lawmakers to draw districts that allow racial/linguistic minorities to select their representatives.
Although Republicans insist that they have followed Florida’s law, many legal professionals disagree.
Douglas Spencer, a University of Colorado-Boulder law professor, said that this is not an difficult legal question. If they took the most gerrymandered American history map and allowed it to stand, it would be a complete abdication from the rule of law.
Spencer stated that he is optimistic that Florida’s state supreme Court will eventually strike down the map, but noted that he is in a minority of redistricting experts. Six of the seven members of Florida’s state supreme court were appointed to it by Republican governors.
The once-in-a-decade redistricting process was a nervous start for Democrats, with Republicans in control of drawing far more congressional seats. This is due to both GOP success in state elections, and the Democrats reform push that has led them to cede power in line-drawing to independent commissions in states like Colorado.
However, Democrats were relatively successful in shifting the House seat that was closest to President Joe Biden’s five-point margin for victory in 2020. It is impossible to accurately assess how the party performed until the Florida and New York litigation ends. However, it is likely that the map will still favor Democrats more than after 2010, when Republicans used statehouse dominance in an attempt to secure a House majority using partisan maps. The majority of the Democrats’ gains were made in New York, the state with the highest population and where the party controlled line drawing. It also had the potential to win as many as four House seats through its partisan map.
A legal ruling at a very late stage of the redistricting process is the reason for the recent flurry in state court actions. The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts are not allowed to policing partisan-gerrymanders. These maps are drawn to benefit one party and contain lines that will capture enough voters to win elections reliably.
Redistricting litigation was then transferred to state courts. The Brennan Center for Social Justice’s Michael Li said that state courts have been in many ways the hero of this cycle. He argued against gerrymandering as well as for redistricting reform.
Li pointed out that state courts have weaknesses that the federal system does not have. The composition of many state courts changes from election to electoral, making decisions in places like Ohio and North Carolina dependent upon which party has the political wind at its back in November. In New York, for example, the state courts are very uneven. In New York, they aggressively fight against gerrymanders. However, in Texas, where the state supreme court has been so conservative, civil rights groups have instead turned to federal courts to challenge maps drawn in recent decades by the GOP-controlled legislature.
There is more uncertainty about the legal landscape for redistricting this election cycle due to the fact that the conservative majority on U.S. Supreme Court suggested it might rewrite the rules governing the drawing of legislative district lines. In February, conservatives at the court suggested that they may revise standards for how to draw districts so that they are in line with the Voting Right Acts requirement that minorities have the opportunity to choose their representatives and not be scattered among other races. In March, four conservative justices indicated their willingness to consider arguments from Republican lawyers that only state legislatures can draw congressional maps.
Redistricting reformers expressed their satisfaction with the performance of the courts in this cycle, even though they are still skeptical. Suzanne Almeida from Common Cause, a frequent litigant who opposes gerrymanders noted that courts in Republican States like Ohio have joined those in deep Democratic States like New York in removing partisan mapping.
Almeida suggested that if I ran the world there would be national standards against the practice of gerrymandering to ensure that the entire congressional map is not distorted by gerrymandering. A Democratic proposal for exactly that fell on deaf ears in Congress earlier in the year. Almeida stated that we are taking all the wins we can.