Latest news with #gerrymandering
CBS News
a day ago
- Politics
- CBS News
Supreme Court orders more arguments in Louisiana redistricting case
Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday ordered further arguments over Louisiana's congressional map that was approved by the state's GOP-led legislature and created a second majority-Black district. An order from the court issued on the last day of its term restored the case to its calendar for reargument, with an additional scheduling order to come. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the move to order more arguments and said the court should have decided the case. The move means the state's map with two majority-Black districts remains intact for now. The district lines at the center of the dispute were invalidated in 2022 by a three-judge lower court panel, which sided with a group of self-described "non-African-American voters" who had challenged the House map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The map wasn't the first crafted by the state's Republican-led legislature in the wake of the 2020 Census. Instead, Louisiana's efforts to redraw district lines, as all states do after the census, have resulted in a yearslong legal battle that has been before the Supreme Court twice before. The case demonstrated the challenges state lawmakers face when trying to balance complying with the Voting Rights Act without relying too much on race during the drawing the political lines, which can run afoul of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court's decision is also likely to have implications for the balance of power in the House in the 2026 midterm elections, when Republicans will try to hold onto their razor-thin majority. The legal wrangling over Louisiana's congressional map has spanned several years and began after the state legislature redrew the six House districts in early 2022. A federal judge in Baton Rouge ruled that year that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it diluted Black voting strength, and ordered the state to put a remedial plan in place that had two majority-Black congressional districts. That initial map had one majority-Black district and five majority-White districts, even though African Americans make up nearly one-third of Louisiana's population. The new map adopted by the state legislature reconfigured Louisiana's 6th Congressional District to bring the map into compliance with the Voting Rights Act, state lawmakers said. But they said they also had a second goal: to protect powerful Republican incumbents in the House, namely Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Julia Letlow. Letlow is the only woman in the state's congressional delegation and sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee, state officials noted. The new District 6 has a Black voting-age population of roughly 51% and stretches from Shreveport, in Louisiana's northwest corner, to Baton Rouge in the southeast, connecting predominantly Black communities along the way. But after the new voting lines were adopted, 12 "non-African-American voters" sued the state and alleged the reconfigured District 6 was a racial gerrymander that violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. A divided three-judge district court panel sitting in Shreveport agreed and said the legislature relied too much on race when it drew the new House district lines. Louisiana Republicans joined with Black voters and voting rights groups — who were on opposing sides in the challenge to the original map — to ask the Supreme Court to let the state use the new congressional map for the 2024 elections. The high court granted their request for emergency relief, and in November, Louisiana voters sent two Black Democrats to Congress. The Supreme Court then agreed to take up the case. The redistricting dispute is one of several the high court has been confronted with in recent years, and more continue to make their way to the justices. In a landmark 2013 ruling, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act's preclearance requirement, which required certain states and localities with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to receive Justice Department approval before changing their election rules. Then, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts do not have a role to play in deciding legal fights over partisan gerrymandering, when state's voting lines are drawn to entrench the political party in power. But in an unexpected ruling in 2023, the Supreme Court declined an invitation to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Instead, the high court invalidated Alabama's congressional map crafted after the 2020 Census, which ultimately led to the election of the state's second Black House member.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Republicans admit gerrymandering. SC Supreme Court weighs if that's allowed
Two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld South Carolina's new congressional maps, rejecting claims that they were racially biased. Now, the state Supreme Court will weigh whether those maps, drawn explicitly to weaken the Democratic vote, violate the state Constitution because they're too partisan. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with South Carolina's Republican leadership, who argued that the maps drawn in 2021 were not intended to dilute Black votes, merely Democratic ones. But a new suit brought by the League of Women Voters, a national nonpartisan organization, argues that the state constitution should prevent maps from being drawn in an overtly partisan manner. 'You cannot intentionally dilute a group of voters in a way to affect their electoral opportunities,' said Allen Chaney, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, who represented the League. Their argument is based on a clause in the state constitution that guarantees every South Carolina resident 'an equal right to elect officers and be elected to fill public office.' Courts in New Mexico, Kentucky and Pennsylvania have ruled that similar language in their state constitutions prohibit overly-partisan gerrymandering. After a suit was brought by the NAACP against the redrawn maps in 2021, state Republicans denied allegations that they made the district more Republican by moving Black voters out of the district. Instead, the Republicans admitted, they targeted Democrats. Will Roberts, the lead cartographer for the Senate Republicans, testified he was 'one hundred percent' focused on creating a more favorable Republican district when drawing the map in 2021. Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey testified at trial that partisanship was 'one of the most important factors.' The 2021 district maps were the first ones drawn after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a civil rights-era requirement that South Carolina submit congressional maps for federal pre-approval. While gerrymandering, or the redrawing of electoral boundaries to favor one party or the other, is a built-in part of the country's political system, the 2021 maps go too far, lawyers from the ACLU argued. In essence, they have deprived voters in a competitive district the opportunity to have a meaningful impact in an election. The ACLU wants the Supreme Court to halt congressional elections until the state's General Assembly draws maps that are more fair. The next congressional elections are scheduled for November 2026. 'I don't think the court can reward lawmakers here for figuring out how to accomplish the same effect with sophisticated and nuanced means,' Chaney told the Supreme Court. The lawsuits have focused on the the 1st Congressional District in the Lowcountry, where the impact of gerrymandering is most clearly seen. The district was redrawn to shift people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 into the neighboring 6th Congressional District, a safe Democratic seat occupied by U.S. Rep. James Clyburn of Columbia. The 1st Congressional District seat is currently held by Nancy Mace, a Republican who won her 2020 race by just 1% of the vote. After the congressional map was redrawn, Mace won reelection in 2022 by roughly 14% and again in 2024 by almost 17%. The redrawn plan moved 53,000 people from the 6th Congressional District into the 1st. About 140,000 people, including more than 30,000 Black voters, were then moved from the 1st Congressional District into the 6th, which runs from North Charleston to Richland County, according to court filings. The process, known as packing, concentrates voters of one party in a district, lessening the impact they can have elsewhere. The realities of 'political geography' mean that not every voter can expect to see their chosen candidate be elected, Chaney said. But there's a big difference between being a Democratic voter in Oconee County, where more than 75% of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024, and a Democratic voter in politically diverse Charleston County. Lawyers for the state's Republican leadership, who redrew the maps, offered a range of arguments to defend their position. Grayson Lambert, representing Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, argued that the original drafters of the state constitution had never intended for it to prevent partisan gerrymandering. A review of contemporary records, like newspapers, from the time the constitution was drafted 130 years ago found no discussion of partisan gerrymandering. 'It would be inconceivable that no one put forward that argument' if that's what the constitution intended to prevent, Lambert argued. John Moore, a lawyer for Senate President Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, argued that the constitution simply 'protects every voter's right to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted.' It is impossible to remove politics from redistricting, Moore said. He argued that the electoral process provided sufficient checks and balances to reapportionment without the court having to act as a referee. If voters didn't like how politicians were redrawing district maps, they should vote them out, Moore argued. 'The court should decline to wade into this political thicket,' Moore said. Andrew Matthias, representing House Speaker Murrell Smith, appeared to take it a step further, telling Chief Justice John Kittredge that the court actually had no authority to review the General Assembly's redistricting plans. While it is unclear whether justices will accept that they have no role to play, they appeared wary of wading into the challenges of redistricting without a clear standard to follow. 'There has to be a guideline. It can't just be what my gut says, or your gut or someone else's,' said Chief Justice John Kittredge. Urging the judge's to take up the issue, Chaney said that the right for a citizen of South Carolina to have their vote matter was not a partisan issue. 'We would be here making the argument if it was Democratic gerrymandering.'
Al Arabiya
3 days ago
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
Wisconsin Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Challenges to the State's Congressional District Boundaries
The liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to hear challenges brought by Democrats seeking to throw out the battleground state's current congressional district boundaries before the 2026 midterms. The decision, made without explanation from the court, is a setback for Democrats who had hoped for new, friendlier district boundary lines in Wisconsin as they attempt to win back control of the House next year. Democrats asked the court to redraw the maps, which would have put two of the state's six congressional seats currently held by Republicans into play. It was the second time in as many years that the court had refused to hear the challenges. Democrats hoped the court would revisit the congressional lines after it ordered state legislative boundaries redrawn. Democrats then picked up seats in the November election. 'It's good that Wisconsin has fair maps at the state level, but we deserve them at the federal level as well,' Democratic US Rep. Mark Pocan said. 'Unfortunately, gerrymandered maps for members of Congress will remain in Wisconsin.' Attorneys who brought the lawsuits did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Republicans hold six of the state's eight US House seats, but only two of those districts are considered competitive. Two requests to reconsider the congressional boundaries were filed with the court, which is controlled 4–3 by liberal justices. One came from the Elias Law Group, which represents Democratic groups and candidates, and the other came on behalf of voters by Campaign Legal Center. Democrats argued that the court's decision to redraw maps for state legislative districts a couple years ago opened the door to revisiting maps for US House districts. They also argued that the current map violates the state constitution's requirement that all Wisconsin residents be treated equally. In 2010, the year before Republicans redrew the congressional maps, Democrats held five seats compared with three for Republicans. The current congressional maps drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers were approved by the state Supreme Court when it was controlled by conservative judges. The US Supreme Court in March 2022 declined to block them from taking effect. And last year, the state Supreme Court rejected a request to reconsider the maps without giving a reason as to why. One of the seats that Democrats hope to flip is in western Wisconsin. Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden won an open seat in 2022 after longtime Democratic Rep. Ron Kind retired. Von Orden won reelection in the 3rd District in 2024. The other seat they are eyeing is southeastern Wisconsin's 1st District. Republican Rep. Bryan Steil has held it since 2019. The latest maps made that district more competitive but still favor Republicans.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Florida Republicans racially gerrymandered two state senate districts, court hears
Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard. In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate 'artificially white', the court was told. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, representing voters at a four-day trial in Tampa last week, said the state's defense that the waters of Tampa Bay made the new district contiguous was ridiculous, pointing out in the lawsuit that 'manatees don't vote'. 'These are cities on opposite sides of the bay and there's no way to go directly between them,' Caroline McNamara, an ACLU staff attorney, said. 'You either have to go across 10 miles of open ocean at the mouth of Tampa Bay, or you have to cut through other districts in the area through the north end.' The case has direct parallels in previous moves by Republican officials in Florida to manipulate voting districts to their advantage by undercutting Black voting power. Ron DeSantis, the hard right governor, was behind a move in 2022 to redraw congressional maps to secure four additional seats, a plan that resulted in white Republicans winning all four races in northern Florida while cutting the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two. 'It was a lynching,' Brenda Holt, a Black commissioner in Gadsden county, told the Guardian at the time. In the Tampa Bay case, the three judges will give their ruling at a later date on whether the Republican-held senate's 2022 redistricting process was unconstitutional. A decision in favor of the plaintiffs would require a redrawing of Florida's 16th and 18th senate districts, subject to appeal. Currently, the state senator for the split district is Darryl Rouson, a Democrat, who maintains offices in both St Petersburg and Tampa, and must drive through the middle of another district to get from one to the other. 'It's like all of the voters have half a senator, half of the time. It's crazy,' McNamara said. 'Every year there's big celebrations on Martin Luther King Day in January, and he has to alternate years whether he's in St Petersburg or Tampa, because he can't do both.' One of the three plaintiffs, Keto Nord Hodges, a Black Hillsborough county voter, told the court he felt underrepresented. 'We don't really see Senator Rouson in Tampa. I can't remember the last time I saw him,' he said. While the Tampa side of the district Rouson represents was always reliably Democratic, and he secured almost twice the number of votes than his Republican opponent in the 2022 election, the removal of Black voters from St Petersburg diluted their voting power in the newly created district there, the lawsuit states. Republican Nick DiCeglie, who is white, coasted to victory over his Democratic challenger Eunic Ortiz, who is Hispanic and openly gay, in 2022 by more than 30,000 votes in one of the country's most diverse cities. Effectively, the ACLU argued, the maps represent racial gerrymandering because they pack about half of the region's Black population into a single one of the its five senate districts. 'This trial laid bare what many communities have long felt, that Florida's mapmakers chose politics over fairness,' Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement. 'When lawmakers choose to prioritize outdated assumptions about where Black voters 'belong' over meaningful representation, it reinforces structural inequities. We're here to ensure that voters in Tampa and St Petersburg are no longer crammed into one district in a way that diminishes the value of their votes.' McNamara dismissed the arguments of lawyers for Cord Byrd, the Florida secretary of state, and Ben Albritton, the Florida senate president, that the maps complied with state law requiring any redistricting process to ensure minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. 'They just thought this is a box to check they probably wanted to do what they needed to do but not more,' she said. 'We say that they didn't even do what they needed to do, like they just didn't take it seriously, they were dismissive throughout the process.' The Florida department of state did not respond to the Guardian's requests for comment. McNamara said that although DeSantis had no direct role in drawing the senate maps, the process took place against the governor's backdrop of 'disenfranchisement and attacks on communities of color'. She said: 'You could say this is just a technical thing, or it's about numbers, and sure, who cares if it crosses water? 'But the fact they're like, 'who cares if these two completely far-flung areas are joined together without any real connection, and the only basis for doing it is the color of the people's skin?' Well, that's exactly the issue that the 14th amendment of the constitution has a problem with.'
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Miller a permanent burr under saddles of local Democrats
Jun. 19—Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Boy, do local Democrats despise her. That's U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, R-Oakland, of course. She of the inflexible and strident conservative outlook who represents a portion of Champaign County in addition to a slew of others. The local Democrats don't dislike her as much as they do President Donald Trump. But their rage is in the same blast area. But what can they do about a problem like Mary? Nothing. Local Dems will have to get used to it. Says who? Powerhouse Illinois Democrats who in 2021 drew new congressional maps that featured 17 gerrymandered districts — 14 for the Ds and three for the Rs. To guarantee themselves 14 wins every two years, the Dems had to account for GOP voters. Because Illinois law unfairly bars Democrats from driving Republicans out of the state, map-drawers chose to lock up identifiable Republican voters in three districts: Miller in the 15th District, Michael Bost in the 12th and Darin LaHood in the 16th. They drew the other 14 districts in winding, twisting ways that are the opposite of the required "compact and contiguous" guideline the law supposedly requires. Map-drawers, using computers for guidance, were able to include just enough Ds in them to generate winning election results through 2032. (The map-drawing conspiracy begins anew in 2031 after the decennial census. There's speculation that population woes will cost Illinois at least one — possibly two — House seats.) The Ds were especially creative in drawing U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski's 13th District. Reviewing Budzinski's snake-like district that runs from East Central Illinois to the Missouri border, the Washington Post called it the "most gerrymandered" of the nation's 435 House districts. Unfortunately, there were tradeoffs that currently anguish local Ds. To get Budzinski, they also got Miller — from their point of view, a Lou Brock-for-Ernie Broglio fiasco. There's Miller — the conservative hard case who rejects pork-barrel projects even for her own district — and Budzinski — the liberal who speaks sufficiently fluent conservative to credulous constituents. Miller didn't have a cakewalk to the U.S. House. Democrats arranged for a cage-match primary between two Republicans — Miller and former U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis — in 2022. Local Democrats didn't like Davis either. That was best reflected when Davis, making an appearance at Parkland College, mentioned to a hostile crowd that he was among a group of Republican House members targeted for murder by gun-wielding Belleville resident James Hodgkinson. "So what if you dodged a couple of bullets," one crowd member responded. Hodgkinson was shot and killed by police. But he wounded two officers and several others, two near fatalities. Thanks to a late Trump endorsement, Miller defeated Davis in the 2022 primary. Now she's ensconced in a district the Cook Partisan Voting Index describes as "R+20." Two days into her first House term, Miller unwisely created a storm when she cited German dictator Adolf Hitler's effectiveness in winning the "hearts and minds" of youngsters. "Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future,'" she said. Miller recently raised another stir when she misidentified a Sikh religious leader leading the daily House prayer as a Muslim and said it was "deeply troubling" that a Muslim was invited to lead the prayer. Whatever her stances or comments, Miller is unbowed and unapologetic. She vows to "always vote no against the radical agenda of the left." That's the equivalent of scraping fingernails across a blackboard to local Democrats. Thanks to the map-drawing Democrats, Miller remains free to do just that.
