Drawing Lines on Lines

Paper: Washington Post, The (DC)

Date: March 8, 2006

NEARLY TWO years ago, the Supreme Court examined a fundamental threat to American democracy and waved it off. The issue was political gerrymandering -- specifically, a Pennsylvania redistricting plan under which Republican officeholders systematically sought to diminish the state's Democratic congressional caucus.

The court had suggested earlier that a gerrymander blatant enough to effectively foreclose political participation by one side or the other could offend the Constitution. But it had never seen one that bad -- and it didn't in the Pennsylvania case, either. While four justices would have taken a close look, four others voted to remove the courts from this area altogether -- leaving Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in the middle, unwilling either to slap down Pennsylvania's plan or to preclude similar challenges in the future.

The future arrived last week, when the infamous 2003 Texas redistricting plan landed at the court for oral arguments. The Texas plan, inspired by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, is even worse -- far worse -- than was Pennsylvania's. It's not just that it sought to maximize one party's representation in the state's congressional delegation -- that was its entire purpose. The state already had a redistricting map, put in place by a court in 2001 following the 2000 Census. But Republican lawmakers, having won control of the Texas legislature in 2002, suddenly found themselves with the power to redraw the lines. So, in an unprecedented move, they reopened the redistricting process in the middle of the decennial census cycle to gain more Republican seats.

Partisan gerrymanders are nothing new. The plan Texas Republicans replaced, in fact, was based largely on an earlier gerrymander by Democrats. But unlike in other states, where legislative motives are hidden or mixed, Texas's mid-cycle project reveals in its policymakers what a lower court called the "single-minded purpose" of "gaining partisan advantage." Its new plan pitted Democratic incumbents against one another and drew their districts to include large numbers of conservative voters; it packed minority voters into other districts. And it worked: Five Democratic incumbents lost their seats in 2004.

Courts ought to tread cautiously in such an innately political area, where principles are so hard to define. But treating partisan redistricting as a purely political matter has dangers of its own, namely that the nature of the problem tends to preclude repair by the political system. With computer technology allowing unprecedented precision in remapping, more and more seats are becoming "safe" for one party or the other and elections more and more farcical. This, in turn, creates a House of Representatives in which members need only keep their bases happy, driving ever-greater partisan polarization. How many such politicians are going to vote to make themselves subject to easier challenges or to give up the power to pick their voters?

The courts supervise redistricting to a great degree. They scrutinize the use of race as a factor in drawing lines and enforce numerical parity among districts. Indeed, it was other aspects of the Texas plan on which the justices focused during much of last week's arguments. The Supreme Court has already made clear that it will generally look the other way when voters are rendered irrelevant on account of their political views. The question now is whether it will draw any lines at all concerning the political manipulation of district lines, or whether anything really does go.

Section: Editorial

Page: A18