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发帖数: 692 | 1 http://time.com/4826980/gerrymandering-gill-whitford-partisan/
How This Supreme Court Case Will Affect the Next Election
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear argument this fall in a
potentially landmark partisan-gerrymandering case from Wisconsin. This will
give the Justices an opportunity to weigh in on an important question that
they’ve never clearly answered: Whether there are any constitutional limits
on politicians’ ability to draw electoral maps to give their party a leg
up. How the Court decides will go a long way to determining whether you
choose your representatives — or the other way around — and whether you’
ll be able to hold them accountable when they put party agendas over your
interests.
The Wisconsin case — known as Gill v. Whitford — is a great opportunity
for the Justices to (attempt to) answer this question because it involves an
especially extreme and troubling example of gerrymandering. In 2010,
Wisconsin voters elected a Republican governor and Republican majorities to
both statehouses, giving the GOP total control over the state’s
redistricting process for the first time in 40 years. The party’s leaders
seized the opportunity. They hired a private law firm to supervise aides and
consultants who worked away in a secret “map room” Democrats were shut
out of the process, and even rank-and-file Republicans were shown only
information relating to their own districts. Leadership rushed the approval
process for the final plan, which was engineered to ensure Republicans would
get a 54-seat majority even if they only garnered 48% of the statewide vote.
The map performed even more reliably than expected. In 2012, Republicans won
60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of
the two-party state-wide vote; in 2014, they won 63 seats with only 52% of
the state-wide vote. These results are way off from what we’d expect given
the history of Wisconsin’s elections. And using this extremely unusual
majority, Republicans in the legislature went on to pass a raft of
controversial legislation, including (on party lines) a law eliminating
investigations into political misconduct that had targeted associates of
Scott Walker, the state’s Republican governor.
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Parties using super-majorities to pursue extreme agendas is unfortunate and
wrong, but not hard to explain. After all, if legislators think their
majorities are safe regardless of how you vote, why wouldn’t they think
they have leeway to push the envelope? (A similar dynamic seems to be at
work in Congress right now, where the wildly unpopular health care bill
passed the House even with twenty Republicans defecting.)
In 2015, a group of Wisconsin voters sued to force the legislature to draw a
less biased and more representative map. This was, in many ways, a gamble:
no plaintiffs had taken a partisan-gerrymandering case to trial and won in
more than three decades. But the plaintiffs broke that streak. (Plaintiffs
in racial gerrymandering cases — which ask courts to determine whether
mapmakers relied too heavily on race when drawing district lines — have
historically had more success, including a major victory in North Carolina
in May.)
The trial court ruled that the assembly map was “an aggressive partisan
gerrymander” that unconstitutionally guaranteed a Republican majority in
the state assembly “in any likely electoral scenario,” violating both the
Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause (which, among other things,
requires that all voters have an equal opportunity to participate in
elections) and the First Amendment. In making their case to the court, the
challengers pointed to strong evidence that the bias in the Wisconsin map
wasn’t accidental, including documents showing how the mapmakers used
advanced statistics to figure out how each district would vote and how they
developed a string of maps that became increasingly biased in favor of
Republicans with each iteration. The goal of the map, as one key document
said, was to “determine who’s here 10 years from now.” The plaintiffs
also relied on the results of the “efficiency gap,” a mathematical test
that can flag maps that have a level of bias so high that it’s
statistically unlikely that it’s random.
Wisconsin argued that it was impossible to draw a less biased map because
Democrats were clustered together while Republicans were spread around the
state. The trial court found, however, that any clustering — to the extent
it existed — couldn’t account for the map’s severe and durable levels of
bias.
If the Supreme Court agrees that Wisconsin’s gerrymander is
unconstitutional, you could see substantial changes to redistricting. The
ruling would open the door to challenges targeting other maps that have the
same kind of extreme, lasting bias favoring one party that’s been seen in
Wisconsin. A recent report by the Brennan Center shows there are roughly six
congressional maps and nine or so state legislative maps like that right
now. Challenges are already pending in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. More
importantly, a win for the plaintiffs will change the rules of the game for
the next round of redistricting in 2021. If legislators can no longer get a
pass for drawing maps to maximize their party’s advantage, they’re less
likely to try to do so.
Changes in how legislators draw maps would likely have a major impact on how
Congress and state legislatures look and act. For example, the same Brennan
Center report shows that 16 to 17 Republican seats in the current House of
Representatives are due to extremely biased maps. That’s a majority of the
24 seats Democrats would need to win to take back control of the House. With
a different mix of legislators on the Hill, Congress’ legislative
priorities could change.
This all means that you could see the return of legislatures that more
accurately mirror the diverse communities they represent, and legislators
that are more responsive to your concerns. When politicians can’t pick
their voters and retreat to their safe seats, voters are back in charge.
If, meanwhile, the Court rules in a way that gives partisan gerrymandering a
greenlight, the battle against partisan abuses likely would shift from the
courts to voters. In several states — including Michigan and Ohio —
reformers are putting together ballot initiatives to turn redistricting over
to independent commissions. But this solution isn’t available in every
state, only underscoring the importance of the Court stepping in this fall
to provide some new ground rules.Those rules will set the tone for American
politics and elections for a generation and determine whether voters, rather
than politicians, run our governments. It doesn’t get much more
fundamental than that. |
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