Supreme Court rules Texas district invalid

SCOTUSblog on the Texas gerrymandering ruling that the Supreme Court handed down today:

The Supreme Court, splintering widely, on Wednesday found an insufficient claim of partisan gerrymandering in the Texas congressional redistricting. It also rejected a challenge to mid-decade congressional redistricting. It did not rule on whether all partisan gerrymander claims are beyond judicial review. The Court is split on that issue, and the division remains. It found the state's new District 23 invalid under the federal Voting Rights Act. District 24 was upheld against a Voting Rights Act challenge. The opinion can be found here.

The voting rights coalition eked out a small victory in getting a rotten borough invalidated. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts didn't even want to give them that much.

The Court voted 7-2 that legislators can redistrict as often as they want, not just once a decade.

The Constitution says states must adjust their congressional district lines every 10 years to account for population shifts. In Texas the boundaries were redrawn twice after the 2000 census, first by a court, then by state lawmakers in a second round promoted by DeLay after Republicans took control.

That was acceptable, the justices said. [WaPo]

The Court also left open the possibility of adjudicating partisan gerrymandering disputes in the future.

Comments

[Daryl McCullough]

I like Kevin Drum's suggestion, from a few years back, that we get rid of gerrymandering completely by adopting the following completely arbitrary rule: If a state has N congressional seats, then draw a line across the state running East-West such that fraction 1/N of the state's population lives to the north of the line. The first congressional district will run from this line to the northern border of the state. Draw a second line so that fraction 2/N of the state's population lives to the north of the line. The second district runs from this line to the first line. Continue until you have drawn N-1 lines.

The drawback to this approach is that it doesn't allow for intentional gerrymandering in order to give a minority Congressional representation, but it seems that gerrymandering is as likely to be used against minorities as it is to be used in their favor.

[packerland_progressive]

"The Court also left open the possibility of adjudicating partisan gerrymandering disputes in the future."

Well, glad to know the Court left itself sufficient wiggle-room to be able to strike down on equal protection grounds any attempted redistricting by the Dem-controlled legislatures and governors of Illinois and New Jersey to create more D seats (and thus more accurately reflect the deep-blue population of those states, which is the converse of the justification Delay and company gave for the Texas redistricting).

[mudkitty]

So much for the strict constructionists being strict constructionists.