When the Supreme Court knocked down GOP electoral maps in two North Carolina congressional districts Monday, the ruling joined a string of court opinions from Virginia, Texas, Alabama, and Wisconsin that have mainly gone against Republican lawmakers.
The flurry of decisions will provide leverage for Democrats at both the state and congressional levels in 2018 and after 2020, when new district maps will be redrawn following the U.S. Census.
But the Supreme Court's ruling against North Carolina lawmakers might also open the door to more challenges based on racially-motivated districting. It's been a particularly tricky line for justices to pinpoint in the South, where race and party affiliation heavily correspond with each other, and the court has traditionally viewed partisan-motivated gerrymandering as within the bounds of legality.
However, some experts say the new ruling has flipped the script on partisan vs. racial motivations for drawing district lines.
“It’s the first time the court has used party as a proxy for race,” Doug Johnson, a redistricting expert at Claremont McKenna College, told the Washington Post. “It opens the door to throwing out partisan gerrymandering as well.”
Richard Hasen, who teaches election law at the University of California, Irvine, agrees:
This case is a big deal because it's going to make it much easier for voting rights plaintiffs, especially in the American South, to challenge gerrymanders that are done by Republican legislatures.
But in terms of immediate effects, here's a quick rundown of this year’s decisions from Amber Phillips.
January: Wisconsin and Alabama are told to redraw state legislative maps
Alabama: A federal court found a dozen state legislative districts in Alabama were unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. (The Democratic judge on that panel wrote that he would have thrown out 24 districts.) [...]
Wisconsin: A federal court ordered Wisconsin’s legislature to redraw state House legislative districts after finding in November that the districts were unconstitutionally partisan.
March: GOP-drawn state lines in Virginia and three congressional districts in Texas are thrown into question
In Virginia, the Supreme Court ordered a lower court to weigh whether the GOP-drawn map was illegal.
Virginia state elections are in the fall, and all 100 state House seats are up. It’s unclear whether the legal challenges will finish in time to require the redrawing of maps. [...]
A federal court decided that Texas’s legislature intentionally tried to disenfranchise minority voters when it drew its congressional districts in 2011.
The court threw out three districts — two of which are held by Republicans. Any redrawing will likely give Democrats and Latino voters more say here.