Divided Supreme Court Upholds Pennsylvania Gerrymandering
WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court refused Wednesday to restrain state lawmakers from drawing electoral districts in a way that favors their political friends and punishes their political foes.
Partisan gerrymanders have been a fact of life throughout American history, said Justice Antonin Scalia, and there is no way for judges to decide when this inherently political process becomes too political.
He spoke for the court's conservative bloc in concluding that judges should never get involved in these intensely political battles.
In a separate opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy agreed that Pennsylvania's Republicans did not go too far in 2002 when they redrew the districts in a way that favored GOP candidates and ultimately gave Republicans 12 seats and the Democrats seven in the state's congressional delegation.
The 5-4 ruling is a major disappointment for liberal reformers who had hoped that the court would insist on fairness and equality in the political process.
They argued that elections are being "rigged" across the country so that politicians pick their voters, instead of the other way around.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats used their majorities in state legislatures to ensure that their party would maintain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Typically, they would draw district lines in a way that would lump Republicans into a few districts, leaving most with a comfortable majority of Democratic voters.
In recent years, and particularly since the 2000 census, Republicans have done the same. And thanks to more sophisticated computers, reformers say, state party officials can engineer the results long before the voters go to the polls.
Lawyers challenging this process had hoped the Supreme Court would rule that democracy requires elected representatives to reflect the will of most voters, not the line-drawing skill of the state lawmakers who control the process.
"Today's decision means that the courts have given up on trying to curb even the most outrageous partisan gerrymanders," said Tom Gerety, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. He cited Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Texas as examples of overly partisan line-drawing.
While the framers of the Constitution envisioned the House of Representatives as reflecting the will of the people, political scientists say that, today, it rarely reflects democracy in action. In 2002, for example, 99% of the House incumbents who sought reelection won.
