washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

SCOTUS Redistricting Decision and Dems’ Future

by Pete Ross
New Donkey’s Ed Kilgore has a post that nicely limns the SCOTUS decision on redistricting. As Kilgore explains:

It’s clear a sizeable majority of the Court has decided that mid-decade reversals of redistricting plans are not barred by the federal constitutution, and a less-sizeable majority refuses to consider re-redistricting as grounds for strong suspicion that illicit political gerrymandering has occurred. But the Court appears to be all over the place, as it has been for more than a decade, in determining when if ever political gerrymandering can violate the Constitution.
Meanwhile, a 5-4 majority of the Court ruled than one of the districts in the DeLay Map violates the Voting Right Act as a straightforward dilution of Hispanic voting strength. But the decision about how to deal with it was dumped back to a District Court in Texas, which must now decide whether there is anything they can do about it between now and November. Obviously, fixing one district could affect many others.

The SCOTUS decision allowing the Texas legislature to redistrict twice in two years was clearly wrong and it encouraged abuse of political power. By upholding most of DeLay’s gerrymandering initiative, the High Court did the Democrats and the country no good, except for the finding that, yes, it did illegally disempower Latino voters in one of the districts and violate the Voting Rights Act. As Kilgore says “No one can any longer foster the illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court will do anything to stop the madness.” We’re going to be stuck with a GOP-dominated SCOTUS into the forseeable future, so the Dem strategy should assume little relief from the courts. The solution? Kilgore recommends:

But no one should forget that the one place in which a DeLay-style GOP partisan re-redistricting foundered was Colorado, for the simple reason that the state’s own constitution banned mid-decade redistricting. Looking ahead to the next decade, states should strongly consider emulating Colorado’s ban on the practice of overturning congressional and state legislative maps every time partisan control of state government solidifies or flips.

The Colorado model may indeed be a force for stability, but it may not be such a good thing in the long run for the Democratic Party, or the nation for that matter, given the rapid population increases of Latino and African Americans and the extraordinary mobility of Americans. State laws permitting redistricting once in mid-decade, as well as after every census, might better serve a healthy mix of both demographic reality and stability.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.