Supreme Court takes up first test in partisan gerrymandering claims

The Supreme Court is taking up a case about political maps in Wisconsin that could affect elections in Pennsylvania and other states across the country.

Kennedy was undeterred. “I’d like an answer to my question”, he said. That happened in a brief in a case at the heart of the social debate about religious liberty and gay rights, where the justices will decide whether a Colorado businessman can decline to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding because of his First Amendment rights.

Racial gerrymandering has already been struck down by the court. Republican state legislators developed a new electoral map in secret and then passed it on a party-line vote. Now, the Supreme Court is looking at the constitutionality of extreme examples of this practice, and whether it denies citizens the equal protection of the law.

Kennedy questioned only the lawyers for the state of Wisconsin, rather than the plaintiffs.

The case pertains directly to Wisconsin but could affect OH and other states.

New technologies “may produce new methods of analysis that make more evident the precise nature of the burdens gerrymanders impose on the representational rights of voters”, he wrote. John McCain, lawyer Mark W. Moser asked the court to step in an adopt a standard that would block extreme partisan gerrymandering and stop special interest groups from infecting the map drawing process.

WASHINGTON-When a company forces a worker into mandatory arbitration of everything from unsafe working conditions to unpaid overtime, does that trump the worker’s rights under federal labor law?

It would be unreasonable to let voters in a different state challenge Wisconsin’s congressional map, he said, and allowing voters in a single state legislative district to do the same for a statewide map would be just a problematic.

Wisconsin Democrats say the 2011 Republican legislative map violated the First Amendment by punishing them for their political beliefs and violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because it meant to dilute Democratic votes but not Republican ones. Even though only 48 percent of the votes cast in the 2012 election were for Republicans, the rigged map handed 60 of the state’s 99 legislative seats to Republican candidates.

This wasn’t just a problem in Wisconsin.

Thirty-one years ago, in an earlier case about partisan redistricting, it was the Republican National Committee that pointed to the dangers when one party held too much sway over map-making.

In a case that could reshape American politics, the Supreme Court appeared split Tuesday on whether Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves an unfair advantage when they drew political maps to last a decade. The girl’s parents filed suit against the Garden City mayor and aldermen seeking damages for what they argued was negligence on the part of the city by allowing the bleachers to fall into a risky condition.

The Supreme Court heard oral orguments Tuesday.

He gave a hard time to those defending Wisconsin’s 2011 redistricting plan, which has been criticized as one of the most extreme versions of partisan gerrymandering in the country. States are required to draw new legislative and congressional districts after each decade’s census.

The appeals court relied on a decision that same year by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that a similar provision in a federal criminal sentencing law was overly broad.

“Politicians are never going to fix gerrymandering”. In one of those rulings, a dissenting justice warned that the court was trespassing on an “essentially political process” and that lower courts faced with questions about redistricting would have to deal with a “mathematical quagmire”. The group includes some people facing deportation because they’ve committed a crime and others who arrived at the border seeking asylum. Will that advantage last regardless of how the state swings politically to entrench one-party control?

“It’s insane to me that we’ve gone this many years and not had this in place”, Anderson said.

The efficiency gap, which is easier to understand than to describe, is not a flawless solution to the problem of partisan gerrymanders. The Wisconsin map “was the most partisan” map possible. We will most likely know in June whether the Court’s right flank managed to pull him back into their fold. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans went to historic lengths to block President Barack Obama’s pick for Scalia’s seat for months until the presidential election. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked. “What’s really behind all of this?” Kennedy’s vote may well determine whether one’s personal religious beliefs trump another’s right to be treated as an equal citizen under the Constitution.