While the nation continues its efforts to export democracy abroad, the U.S. Supreme Court is engaged in a quiet, far-less-publicized debate here at home over partisan gerrymandering -- the shaping of electoral districts for partisan ends -- that will profoundly influence the state of American democracy for years to come.
Earlier this year, in Vieth vs. Jubelirer, the court considered a challenge to an extreme gerrymander in Pennsylvania in which the Republicans who control the state Legislature drew a new electoral map that gave their own party the edge in 12 out of 19 congressional seats and that most observers agreed was a clear case of partisan manipulation.
But last month, the court unexpectedly rejected the challenge, saying there was no clear, manageable "judicial standard" by which to judge the claim. Thus the Legislature's unfair plan was allowed to go forward.
Now there's a new case before the court that threatens to open the door to unprecedented political abuses. But this case -- the Texas redistricting episode that received so much attention when the Democrats fled across the state border last year -- also offers an opportunity: the chance to carve out just the kind of manageable judicial standard that the court says it has been looking for.
Partisan gerrymandering is as old as the nation. Since the earliest days of the United States, legislatures have redrawn states' congressional districts every 10 years to take into account population shifts and to add or subtract seats. And since legislatures are inherently political bodies, each party has long sought to draw the lines to its partisan advantage.
In recent decades, however, the incidence and extremism of partisan redistricting have escalated. Voting patterns have become more consistently partisan, enabling political mapmakers to better predict how voters will vote. And advances in computer technology and political databases allow cartographers to fine-tune district boundaries to maximize partisan advantage.
Both Democrats and Republicans have sought to manipulate the system by drawing "safe seats" for their own members. The result: fewer competitive elections.
Many observers expected the court to use last month's Vieth case to bring the situation under control. But that did not happen. Although all nine justices agreed that "excessive partisanship" in districting is unconstitutional, the court split over what to do about it. Four justices proposed creating new legal tests for what was acceptable and what was not. But four others predicted that federal courts could never craft standards that would be manageable, and argued that the judiciary should retreat from even trying.
