COURTS DIVIDED OVER PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING | Should The Ninth Circuit Go Splitsies?
January 12, 2018
TODAY IN HISTORY
|On this day in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that state law schools could not discriminate against applicants on the basis of race. The case was Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma.
DANCING WITH OUR HANDS TIED
|This week, two separate rulings on partisan gerrymandering highlighted the growing division among courts on the issue. Tuesday, three federal judges in North Carolina threw out the state’s congressional map because it was “motivated by invidious partisan intent.” And on Wednesday, another panel of judges in Pennsylvania upheld that state’s map, with one judge arguing that such a political issue was none of the courts’ business. So which is it? Michael Wines with The New York Times reports these decisions will no doubt get the attention of our venerable Supreme Court justices as they mull two similar cases of their own. “The courts’ increased focus on the issue reflects the proliferation of extreme partisan gerrymanders — maps that do not merely hobble political opponents, but effectively doom them to permanent underrepresentation. And it points to growing concern that two tenets of American democracy — the concepts of majority rule and protecting the rights of minorities — are being supplanted by a third doctrine: the winner takes all.”
PODCAST DU JOUR – A REALITY CHECK
|Galen Druke with FiveThirtyEight smacks some sense into us with a realistic take on partisan gerrymandering. He argues that it’s unlikely we’ll never actually see an end to the practice. Read his take and listen to the final installment of FiveThirtyEight’s podcast series, “The Gerrymandering Project,” in which the effects of gerrymandering are explored.
LET'S GO SPLITSIES
|“The Ninth Circuit has been a boogeyman for conservatives for decades. The only federal appellate court that already had a majority of Democrat-appointed judges when Barack Obama took office, it epitomizes the progressive legal vanguard on environmental regulation, same-sex marriage, gun control, immigration and almost everything else.” That’s Mark Brnovich and Ilya Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal making an argument for splitting up the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but not for the reason you might think. It’s not about making the court less liberal, so much as it is about the growing population, and thus caseload, of the Western states. They opine, “Because the Supreme Court reviews so few cases, the legal buck generally stops in the circuit courts. The quality of justice is harmed, therefore, when circuit rulings are slow, inconsistent and made by judges unfamiliar with local law.”