PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING AT SCOTUS WEDNESDAY | Ohio Proposing Legislation To Ban Abortions | Kennedy Calls Out Sotomayor

March 26, 2018

Today the Supreme Court handed down its orders from last week’s private conference, with no new cases added to its docket for next term. The justices also didn’t call on the solicitor general to share his views in any cases.

“The Supreme Court will hear evidence this week that Democrats try to game the political system with the same zeal employed by Republicans. They just don’t have as many opportunities.” That’s Richard Wolf with USA Today reporting on this week’s big SCOTUS case out of Maryland that shows partisan gerrymandering can go both ways in aiding whatever political party is in power to best help them maintain that power. Wolf writes, “The case being heard Wednesday will give the high court a chance to see how Democrats designed Maryland’s map with similar strong-arm tactics. That could help assuage CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS’ concern that appearing to favor one party over another would affect the court’s ‘status and integrity’ in the eyes of average Americans.”

AP’s Mark Sherman also reports on the Wednesday gerrymandering case and notes that arguments come nearly six months after justices heard a similar dispute over Wisconsin’s legislative districts. Indeed, this week’s case is part of a much larger conversation about partisan gerrymandering that’s been going on at the courts for some time now. “The justices’ involvement in partisan redistricting reflects a period of unusual activity in the courts on this topic. Over the past 16 months, courts struck down political districting plans drawn by Republicans in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Federal judges threw out a state legislative map in Wisconsin and a congressional plan in North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court invalidated the state’s congressional districts and replaced them with a court-drawn plan.” It’s likely that come June, with Supreme Court rulings on both the Maryland and Wisconsin cases, the question of the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering will finally meet its much-anticipated resolution.

In The New York Times, Michael Li and Laura Royden opine that even if Democrats secure the biggest blue wave imaginable, they’re still going to come up against the “powerful structural force in American politics [of] extreme gerrymandering.” Even if the Supreme Court strikes down the practice, Li and Royden say it will be too little too late for the 2018 elections. “Most Americans will participate in this year’s elections under gerrymandered congressional maps that were created in the wake of the 2010 Tea Party wave. Nearly a decade later, those gerrymanders are still tilting the House toward Republicans, particularly in a few key states.”

Lawmakers in Ohio have proposed legislation to ban all abortions, period. The Editorial Board of The New York Times says, yes this legislation would be unconstitutional, but it comes as part of a much bigger plan to challenge and overturn Roe v. Wade. NYT: “Bills like the Ohio total abortion ban seem outrageous, because they are. But if there’s any lesson to learn from them, it’s that the Republican anti-abortion strategy doesn’t stop with one extreme bill. If it’s up to them, they won’t stop until it’s impossible for many or all women in America to make their own choices about whether to access a safe, popular and common form of health care.”

Robert Barnes with The Washington Post covers last week’s Supreme Court clash where JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY expressed frustration at JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR for visiting the website of one of the clinics party to the big crisis pregnancy center case. Barnes writes, “Kennedy insinuated that Sotomayor had violated some universally accepted Supreme Court procedure by invoking facts found outside the record. But the rule seems to be that justices don’t like other justices doing such research. As soon as the transcript of the proceedings hit the digital world Tuesday afternoon, the Internet was filled with remembrances of other justices — including Kennedy — doing research similar to Sotomayor’s.”