Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rights
Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rights
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 31 Mar 2022 10.00 EDT
In the fall of 2017, I was sitting in the cramped press area at the supreme court as a lawyer named Paul Smith urged the justices to strike down the districts for the Wisconsin state assembly. They were so distorted in favor of Republicans, he argued, that they violated the US constitution. As Smith started to lay out his case, Chief Justice John Roberts cut in and laid out what he feared would happen if the supreme court were to step in and start policing electoral maps based on partisanship.
“We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board. And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision, and let’s say the Democrats win, and that person will say: ‘Well, why did the Democrats win?” Roberts said. “It must be because the supreme court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state. And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.”
The supreme court eventually upheld the Wisconsin districts on technical grounds. But in 2019, the court removed itself and the entire federal judiciary from policing partisan gerrymandering. “Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. He pointed to state courts as one potential forum where litigants could bring claims. Together, those two moments underscore how wary Roberts was of getting the court entangled in redistricting cases, highly politically charged disputes that could pose a serious threat to the court’s apolitical reputation.
That’s why it was so stunning to see the supreme court intervene last week over Wisconsin’s new legislative maps. Instead of staying out of a redistricting dispute, the supreme court went out of its way to insert itself into the center of a dispute in one of America’s most politically competitive states.
More at
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/31/supreme-court-ruling-wisconsin-maps-voting-rights