Gerrymandering is a practice of trying to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. Judges have ruled that Michigan congressional districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
But now, Republicans in both Michigan and Ohio have requested the Supreme Court to temporarily block lower court rulings ordering them to draw new district lines to replace gerrymandered maps.
The League of Women Voters of Michigan and Democratic voters had filed a lawsuit in the state and in the suit they claimed districts were shaped by Republican operatives to guarantee the party’s dominance in the state Capitol after the 2010 census. According to court papers, they said constitutional rights were violated when Democratic areas were placed in certain districts.
It was a three-judge federal panel that made the ruling “that Michigan’s congressional and legislative maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered for partisan gain, ordering the state Legislature to redraw at least 34 districts for the 2020 election. The decision also requires special state Senate elections to be held in 2020, instead of 2022 as scheduled. It is the latest development in a series of redistricting lawsuits in at least a dozen states,” CBS News reported.
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The judges gave the GOP-led Legislature until Aug. 1 to submit new maps.
“Their primary goal was to draw maps that advantaged Republicans, disadvantaged Democrats, and ensured that Republicans could enjoy durable majorities in Michigan’s congressional delegation and in both chambers of the Michigan legislature for the entire decade,” the judges wrote in their decision.
The federal panel included Judge Eric Clay of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. District Judge Denise Page Hood of Michigan’s eastern district and U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist of Michigan’s western district.
There are more decisions on the issue coming as the Supreme Court is weighing decisions in two other partisan gerrymander cases involving congressional districts in North Carolina and Maryland. The justices’ decision in those cases is expected by the end of June.
But the 146-page Michigan opinion made a point to the Supreme Court.
“Federal courts must not abdicate their responsibility to protect American voters from this unconstitutional and pernicious practice that undermines our democracy,” they wrote, adding that failing to protect voters’ rights “will only increase the citizenry’s growing disenchantment with, and disillusionment in, our democracy.”
“Perhaps more strikingly, the judges ruled that all 34 maps violated Democratic voters’ First Amendment right to freedom of association and effectively punished them for their political views by placing them in districts where their votes were worthless. Plaintiffs in the North Carolina gerrymander case made the same argument to the Supreme Court in March,” the New York Times reported.
