Court-Drawn Map in Pennsylvania May Lift Democrats’ House Chances
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court drew new boundaries for the state’s congressional districts on Monday, releasing a map that, if it stands, could play a significant role in Democratic Party efforts to gain control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
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Republicans in the State Legislature said they would challenge the new maps in federal court.
“Implementation of this map would create a constitutional crisis where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is usurping the authority of the legislative and executive branches,” the leaders of the State Senate, Joe Scarnati, and the House, Mike Turzai, said in a statement.
“This map illustrates that the definition of fair is simply code for a desire to elect more Democrats.”
But some election law experts said Republicans’ legal options were narrow.
Earlier this month, the United States Supreme Court refused to block the remapping process.
The Pennsylvania high court’s actions have unfolded in a monthslong challenge to the existing congressional maps begun by the League of Women Voters. The court based its rulings on the State Constitution.
The United States Supreme Court typically respects such decisions.
When the court explained how it came up with its map it appears from this report that it did not allude to considerations of outcome such as that it should be reasonable to expect that no party should end up with a greater share of seats in the US House than its statewide share in the vote for the US House.
And that may be a problem.
The court said that unlike the offerings from partisan mapmakers, the districts it drew “follow the traditional redistricting criteria of compactness, contiguity, equality of population, and respect for the integrity of political subdivisions.”
All the same, the new map does take us closer to that result.
Election law experts said the new map created an equal number of districts favoring Democrats and Republicans.
“It appears to be tilted toward neither political party,” Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, said.
“It looks more like a 9-to-9 division of the state.”
What if we just stop using districts, at all?
Who Needs Congressional Districts? asks Michael Tomasky in The Times.
Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is not going to accept this without a fight.
Toomey: impeaching state Supreme Court justices is a "conversation that has to happen."
Voting rights and redistricting expert Stephen Wolf noted, “WOW, this is increasingly moving from the fringe toward the GOP’s mainstream. You now have a US senator, congressman, & state party chair suggesting impeachment of judges who struck down the GOP’s extreme 13R-5D gerrymander of this 50-50 swing state.”
As Pennsylvania native Jason Easley wrote of the new map, which is arguably even better than the map Democrats asked for, “The map reflects Pennsylvania’s purple status much more than the Republican-drawn map that led to the GOP holding a 13-5 advantage in the state’s US House delegation. The new map is fair, which is all Democrats wanted… This is what a fair map based on actual geography and population looks like.”
We always end up back here, asking why Republicans are trying so hard to suppress the vote, gerrymander the vote, trick the vote, and now, even, every so sadly, allow a hostile foreign power to interfere and attack their own country on their behalf.
If Republicans’ ideas are so popular, why do they need to try so hard to rig the system in their favor.
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