US courts to hear redistricting cases

WASHINGTON -- Federal courts this week take up three constitutional challenges to the widening practice of drawing new congressional districts to favor one party's candidates, a divisive trend that has already reduced competition for seats in the House of Representatives and threatens to make the chamber more polarized.

At issue in the three cases are new redistricting maps drawn after the 2000 Census by Republican-controlled legislatures in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Colorado in an explicit effort to maximize the GOP advantage in more districts and expand the party's thin majority in the House.

The Pennsylvania case comes up tomorrow in the Supreme Court in a crucial test of the constitutionality of "partisan gerrymandering" -- a phrase that originated in Massachusetts nearly two centuries ago when Governor Elbridge Gerry was blamed, unfairly, for his party's tortured design of a district that reminded a political cartoonist of a twisting salamander.

The Texas and Colorado cases unfold later in the week in US District Courts in those states. All three cases raised related issues and represent the most searching judicial examination of gerrymandering in years.

If the new congressional maps are upheld, political analysts predict they would make more seats safe for Republicans and leave Democrats with almost no chance next year to recapture the House majority they lost in 1994.

But control of the House is only part of the impact that observers see in redistricting driven by partisan goals.

Political scientists Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have decried the polarization of the House and reduced political competition for seats.

In the 2002 general election, only four challengers defeated House incumbents -- fewer than at any time in modern history.

"The parties in the House have become much more homogeneous and ideologically polarized," Mann and Ornstein argue in a brief in the Supreme Court case. "Their polarization means that the parties feel the stakes of control are higher. In an almost evenly split House, where even a small gain in seats can make all the difference, parties will struggle hard however they can for each extra seat."

The Republicans now have a 23-vote margin in the 435-member House, and they are looking to the districting process in GOP-controlled state legislatures to solidify their control for years to come.

Democrats are no less determined in their resistance -- as shown by the two walkouts of Democrats from the Texas Legislature in an effort, ultimately futile, to stop passage of a GOP-crafted plan that would give the Republicans clear dominance in the Texas delegation in the House.

The Supreme Court's hearing on the Pennsylvania case tomorrow focuses on the core question of whether redrawing district boundaries with the specific intent of favoring one party's candidates is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

In general, lower courts have made it harder for the losing party in such a legislative battle to get a gerrymander overturned.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel in Tyler, Texas opens a weeklong trial on a variety of constitutional issues over the wholesale revision of Texas' congressional district map. A key issue is whether it is unconstitutional to redistrict more than once between each Census, which is done every ten years.

And sometime this week, a three-judge panel in Denver is expected to lay out a schedule on how it will handle several constitutional questions about the redrafting of Colorado's House districts.

Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court struck down a Republican plan, but did so primarily on the basis of the state constitution. That left unresolved a host of national constitutional issues, and those will now be explored in federal court. Among them is the role that courts may play in second-guessing legislative enactment of partisan gerrymanders.

The fact that the three cases have emerged nearly simultaneously shows that partisan redistricting by the Republican Party is definitely on the upswing, with courts becoming the last hope for the Democratic losers in those battles. In Colorado, though, both Republicans and Democrats are dissatisfied with the way the state supreme court handled that dispute, so they are jousting anew in federal court.

State election officials are anxiously awaiting the outcomes, since it is likely that no one will know for sure how to conduct next year's congressional elections in these states until the court cases are decided.

In Texas, for example, state Democratic chairman Charles Soechting told the Dallas Morning News last week: "We are a little over four months away from the primary election, and no one can say what the congressional lines will be."

In each of the cases in court this week, state officials are stressing the need for constitutional clarity on the validity of partisan gerrymanders.

The Supreme Court has not examined this phenomenon in 17 years. In a 1986 ruling, it allowed partisan gerrymanders to be challenged in court, but the justices could not agree on a standard to determine whether they were constitutional. That is exactly what is at issue in the Pennsylvania case.

The court also has the option of changing its mind altogether and barring all lawsuits against partisan gerrymanders.