The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will decide in its next term a case brought by Democratic voters in Wisconsin who argue that state Assembly districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. "I am pleased that the Court granted our request on this important issue".
"Legislature should be doing what they were ordered to do months ago by the federal panel, which is start redrawing the maps", Rothschild said. "Well, that's as much a political judgment and partisan gerrymander as the one that the plaintiffs alleged to have occurred", Esenberg says.
The challenge for the Supreme Court now is to articulate a standard for determining when "politics as usual" is actually a constitutional violation - and which part of the Constitution is being violated. The map, Judge Kenneth F. Ripple wrote for the majority, "was created to make it more hard for Democrats, compared to Republicans, to translate their votes into seats". Cracking, or spreading, Democratic voters across districts in which Republicans have small majorities wastes all of the Democratic votes when the Republican candidate wins. The liberal wing of the court - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - would not have blocked the order and let the redistricting proceed. The court should take this opportunity to end this practice.
Lawyers for Wisconsin had urged the Supreme Court to summarily reverse the three-judge panel's decision even without hearing the case. Wisconsin Republicans played the electoral map to get similar results - "majorities" with less than 50% of the votes cast.
In the Wisconsin case, the state contends Wisconsin is a purple state in national elections, but its geography favors Republicans in state elections.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the state of Wisconsin's appeal against a decision finding that the state's Republican leadership in 2011 pushed through a redistricting plan so partisan that it violated the Constitution.
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A dozen Wisconsin Democratic Party voters filed suit in 2015 against state election officials over the redistricting, saying the Republican-backed plan divided Democratic voters in some areas and packed them in others in order to dilute their electoral clout and benefit Republican candidates. In 2014, the party garnered 52% of the vote and 63 assembly seats.
Now that the case is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, state Attorney General Brad Schimel says he's thrilled.
At the center of the challenge is a new way to measure the effect of partisan gerrymandering - a formula called the efficiency gap.
The commission oversees redistricting for both state legislative offices and congressional districts. "In this case, a lower court held that Wisconsin had indeed crossed that line", he told CNN.
"The Court rules will affect elections for years to come", he said.
The lower court found that redistricting efforts are unlawful partisan gerrymandering when they seek to entrench the party in power, and have no other legitimate justification. Now it's being argued as a first amendment case, that this is a violation of people's free speech and that's a relatively new argument that might hold some sway with the Supreme Court.
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