The justices will consider rulings from lower courts that found congressional maps in North Carolina and Virginia violated the rights of voters.
The Supreme Court once again will take up unresolved constitutional questions about partisan gerrymandering, agreeing Friday to consider rulings from two lower courts that found congressional maps in North Carolina and Maryland so extreme that they violated the rights of voters.
The North Carolina map was drawn by Republicans, the Maryland districts by the state’s dominant Democrats.
The Supreme Court has never found a state’s redistricting map so infected with politics that it violates the Constitution. It passed up the chance last term to settle the issue of whether courts have a role in policing partisan gerrymandering, sending back on technical rulings challenges to a Republican-drawn plan in Wisconsin, and the challenged Maryland map.
But there will be a new set of justices considering the issue. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who had held out the belief that some gerrymandering could be so political as to be unconstitutional, has been replaced with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who may have a more conservative view on the issue.
In June, the justices said the Maryland case was not ready for it. In November, a unanimous three-judge panel found that Democrats had unconstitutional and intentionally designed to target Republican voters in the 6th Congressional District because of their political affiliation. The legislature redrew the district, which previously stretched across the top of the state, to dip down into Democratic strongholds in the Washington suburbs.
“The massive and unnecessary reshuffling of the Sixth District, involving one-half of its population and dictated by party affiliation and voting history, had no other cause than the intended actions of the controlling Democratic officials to burden Republican voters by converting the district” into a Democratic one,” wrote Judge Paul V.
