Courts have rejected district election maps on grounds they were drawn outlandishly to disadvantage minority voters. The court should take this opportunity to end this practice.
The only way the Wisconsin legislature could have attained the election results sought in the lawsuit would have been to "engage in heroic levels of nonpartisan statesmanship by abandoning Republicans' advantage under court-drawn plans, including by adopting a plan under which incumbents were more likely to lose their seats", the state argued in the brief.
The panel of federal judges found the Assembly districts were unconstitutional because they were "intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters.by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats". Just 90 minutes after justices announced Monday that they would hear the case, the five more conservative justices voted to halt a lower court's order to redraw the state's legislative districts by November, in time for next year's elections.
The state appealed to the supreme court, arguing that recent election results favoring Republicans were "a reflection of Wisconsin's natural political geography", with Democrats concentrated in urban areas including Milwaukee and Madison.
In May, the court struck down to North Carolina congressional districts that it said were based too heavily on race, and that Republicans who controlled the state legislature and governor's office placed too many African-Americans in the two districts.
The report states that the committee's plan was to control the redistricting process in states such as Wisconsin, where they spent $1.1 million to gain control of the state Senate and the state Assembly, according to the report. So this stay order raises a big question mark for those who think Court will use the case to rein in partisan gerrymandering.
Justices in the past have struck down electoral maps as illegal in the past. The Constitution requires states to redo their political maps to reflect population changes identified in the once-a-decade census. The Supreme Court will now consider that decision.
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An inquiry should be properly resourced so it can get the full truth about the fire as quickly as possible, he said. When the prime minister visited the west London site of the fire on Thursday she spoke only to emergency services.
The Wisconsin case of Gill vs. Whitford, to be heard in the fall, could yield one of the most important rulings on political power in decades. The plaintiffs, complaining about an egregious Republican gerrymander of the state legislature, have come up with a new test to measure when politics has over-infiltrated the redistricting process.
The court said both the First Amendment and the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection prohibit redistricting plans that make it harder for members of a disfavored political party to elect their candidates and that can not be justified on legitimate grounds.
Schimel is a Republican who is defending the maps. It is high time for the High Court to stop politicians from drawing district lines for their own political benefit.
States redraw districts for House seats in Congress and for legislative districts in state legislatures. If the Supreme Court sides with the lower court, the out-of-power party in states across the country - whether Republican or Democrat - would have a new avenue for challenging maps.
In a second order, the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote granted a request from Schimel to block a requirement that Wisconsin draw new maps by November 1. In that case and again in 2006, Kennedy didn't find one. "They are trying to accomplish by delay what they couldn't prove in court".
Wisconsin's Republican party won 48.6 percent of the vote in the first election following the release of Wisconsin's current maps.
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