Ian Millhiser at Think Progress brings up a good point. The newly bolstered conservative majority on the Supreme Court seems poised to issue rulings on gerrymandering that they believe will help the Republican Party continue to have more power than their absolute amount of electoral support can justify. As Millhiser details, GOP-drawn districts have led to some preposterous results in recent years, like the Republicans winning control of 63 percent of Wisconsin’s assembly seats in an election in which the Democrats won 54 percent of the popular vote.
Yet, if the 2020 election goes as badly for Donald Trump as some recent polls have indicated it might and the down-ticket conservative candidates suffer severely as a result, the upcoming Supreme Court rulings could backfire on them in a spectacular way.
Up until this point, the Supreme Court’s Republicans have been quite hostile to partisan gerrymandering challenges — although, oddly enough, Brett Kavanaugh appeared more open to these challenges than his four Republican colleagues during oral arguments last March. The smart money suggests that the court will split 5-4 along party lines, quite possibly holding that federal courts aren’t even allowed to consider partisan gerrymandering cases.
…it’s easy to see why Republicans would want such a result. After all, Republicans walloped Democrats in 2010, the last redistricting year. And, if 2020 is an ordinary election, Republicans are likely to emerge from it well-positioned to keep their gerrymanders in place.
But if 2020 is a Democratic wave election, Kavanaugh and his fellow partisans may come to regret taking partisan gerrymandering challenges off the table. After ten years of watching Republicans win elections regardless of what the voters preferred, Democrats are not likely to be in a conciliatory mood in 2020. If they trounce the GOP, Democrats will undoubtedly use their new legislative power to draw the most spiteful, meticulously gerrymandered maps the nation has ever seen.
I’m not as lacking in doubt about this as Millhiser seems to be, but that’s mainly because the left in this country is pursuing progressive reform of the redistricting process. At President Obama’s urging, former attorney general Eric Holder has been leading that process. The Democrats could stop all those efforts on a dime and engage in a spurt of revenge-driven gerrymandering, but I doubt that will happen in more than a few states. What’s more certain is that adverse Supreme Court rulings could disrupt or derail some of these reforms, making the Democrats give up less out of magnanimity than necessity.
In that case, a resort to spitefully and meticulously gerrymandered districts could become a more attractive and uniform option. What I think is more likely is that the Democrats will continue to push for more nonpartisan map-drawing in order to take it out of the hands of politicians. That’s a longer term project than challenging already existing districts in court.
This is actually a topic that it’s worth questioning the presidential candidates about, because a lot will depend on the leadership at the top. But Millhiser is definitely right about one thing. Just because gerrymandering has been working great for the Republicans over the last decade doesn’t mean it will be nearly effective in the next decade if the Democrats have a a big night in November 2020.
Adding some historical context: one reason the New Deal was such a radical change from the status quo is that Prohibitionists and nativists blocked Congressional redisctricting after the 1920 census until 1929 with passage of the Reapportionment Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
Much like today’s Republicans, they said, “Hey, the Constitution says we have to take a census every 10 years and use it to reapportion congressional seats. It doesn’t say *when* we have to do the reapportioning!” #OwningTheWets
With the ensuing Supreme Court case, the reapportionment didn’t happen until the 1932 election, which meant that the 1932 election was the first election in 20 years to take into consideration all the demographic changes that had occurred since 1910. Republicans were locked out of the White House for the next 20 years (and control of Congress for the next 14 years).
From your and Mr. Millheiser’s mouths to God’s ear.
I’d love seeing some Dem gerrymandering with the understanding that they are ultimately replaced by a true non-partisan redistricting process. Get enough Dems elected to pass progressive reform, and then step back. Wouldn’t it be nice…
Once it is clear to everyone that they are partisan hacks (soon enough), there is really nothing to prevent them from allowing Republican gerrymanders and then reversing course and halting Democratic gerrymanders if the rules start preventing more cult members from getting elected. Like they say, stare decisis is for suckers, and when Susan Collins needs to tap dance.
I was going to write the same thing. I can already see the opinion now that simultaneously knocks down Maryland’s gerrymander and upholds all of the others. Why not? What is stopping them?
A few of us from our little town of Sherwood, OR will be meeting with our Democratic House District Leader (recently flipped with help from our group) and our Republican State Senate representative on non-partisan voter redistricting.