A decade of Supreme Court rulings have given states increasingly unfettered power in redistricting

Washington – In June 2019, the Supreme Court swept the idea that the federal courts could slow down the power of state legislators to draw legislative cards designed mainly to anchor the power of their own party.

The decision, a 5-4 division along the ideological lines with conservative judges in the majority, clearly indicated that the partisan gerrymandering was there to remain, in the absence of states which take matters into hand or the improbable scenario of the intervention of the congress to impose a sort of national prohibition.

Writing for the majority, the chief judge John Roberts simply declared that the federal courts did not have the power to intervene on the issue, even if this means that the results of the elections may “seem unfair”.

With technological progress, which makes it easier to draw surgery districts in order to maximize partisan advantages, republican and democratic states have continued this practice.

This is now exposed to Texas while the Republicans plan to redraw the Congress maps to further prolong their domination in the State and isolate against possible democratic gains at the national level during the mid-term elections of 2026, which will determine control of the House of Representatives for the last two years of the mandate of President Donald Trump.

This has prompted Democrats in California and other states to threaten countermeasures.

“It is only a very ugly downward race,” said Richard Pillars, an electoral law expert at the New York University School of Law, who pleaded for the reform. With the control of the house so finely ready, Texas has the incentive to “extract each district they can,” he said.

The legal context of redistribution

Under the Constitution, states legislatures have the main role of drawing legislative cards, but the congress has the specific power to intervene if it chooses and establishes rules on the way it must be done.

States are required to draw new legislative cards after the census that takes place every 10 years.

Texas and all other states have already drawn new cards after the 2020 census. The last saga was invited when Governor Greg Abbott proposed a reassessment of mid-December for a manifest political gain, exhorted by Trump.

States are not prohibited from drawing new cards between censuses, but this is rarely done.

Texas “denigrated the norms that held people in check,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who works on voting rights.

Despite the decision of the Supreme Court in the partisan dispute of Gerrymandering, there are restrictions on the way states draw districts.

Under the previous “one person, one vote” of the Supreme Court, the populations of each district must be similar, therefore the power of each individual voter is not diluted.

Another constraint, at least for the moment, is the law on historic voting rights, a law adopted 60 years ago this week to protect minority voters.

But the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has weakened this law in a series of decisions.

A decision in 2013 emptied a key provision which required certain states with history of racial discrimination to obtain the approval of the federal government before modifying the laws on state vote, which included the adoption of new district cards.

Last week, the Court indicated that it could further weaken the law on voting rights in a case involving the districts of the Louisiana congress.

The court declared that it would examine if it was unconstitutional, under the 14th and 15th amendments, for the states to examine the race in the drawing districts intended to comply with the vote on vote.

A decision in this sense would be “potentially devastating for voting rights,” said Lakin, who is involved in the case.

Last week’s ordinance seemed to suggest that the court could go back to a decision in 2023 which, to the surprise of many commentators, confirmed a challenge to the law on voting rights on a Congress District Congress in Alabama.

The Trump administration has already suggested support for the type of legal argument raised in the Louisiana case in a letter he sent to Texas officials suggesting that the current card is unconstitutional because it was traced according to racial lines, in part to comply with the law on voting rights.

Meanwhile, the current Texas card is still challenged before the courts by civil rights groups which allege that it violates the law on voting rights.

In the midst of the trend towards the partisan line designer, some states have undertaken efforts to exploit the process by setting up commissions instead of allowing legislators to do the work. There are 18 commissions of a certain type, although only eight of them are really independent.

The Supreme Court narrowly confirmed the use of independent commissions in a 2015 decision. The composition of the Court has changed since then, which means that it is not clear if it would now happen to the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, while the Democrats of California rush to try to overcome their redistribution committee in response to the Plan of Texas, it could be less logical than the States establish commissions in the future.

“This considerably undermines the incentives for creating commissions,” said Prouse.

At the time of the gerrymandering partisan decision, liberal judge Elena Kagan warned of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision not to intervene in the Gerrymandered cards in North Carolina and Maryland.

“The practices contested in these cases endangers our system of government,” she wrote. “Part of the role of the court in this system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than the free and fair elections. ”