The Supreme Courts original sin in gerrymandering cases
Few matters capture the pathology of the Roberts Court more completely than the two Abbott v. Perez cases, a pair of identically named racial gerrymandering cases that the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday.
The Perez cases are about partisan gamesmanship. In 2013, the state of Texas admitted in a brief filed in a federal court that their “redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.” They did so because they believed, based on the Supreme Court’s own partisan gerrymandering decisions, that the Court would do nothing to stop such gerrymandering. Texas’ calculation may yet prove to be correct.
The Perezes are cases about delay. Texas enacted its gerrymandered maps in 2011, and while those maps were partially altered in 2013, a federal court found that portions of those maps were illegal racial gerrymanders in 2017. It’s now 2018 and, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s intervention, it is all but certain that the gerrymandered maps will be in effect during this year’s midterm elections. Even if the Supreme Court ultimately rules against Texas, their decision is likely to only impact one election — the 2020 races — before the Census requires the state to draw a new set of maps.
https://thinkprogress.org/supreme-court-texas-gerrymandering-587effd27894/
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Even before the Roberts Era, the Supreme Court never quite got this fact. The Court’s failure to understand that redistricting is a special area of the law requiring extra scrutiny is the original sin of its gerrymandering jurisprudence. It is the reason why Texas is able to get away with employing the maps it has now.
Perez threatens to make matters even worse. At the very moment when the Court’s right flank wants to seize a larger role in shaping American policy, the same flank appears completely unconcerned by efforts to rig elections.
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