“The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines.., which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the past, legal restrictions on racialgerrymandering \u2014 maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party \u2014 had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP<\/em><\/a>, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from \u201crepackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along the way, Alito\u2019s opinion gives the Court\u2019s explicit blessing to maps that are drawn for the very purpose of maximizing one political party\u2019s power. In the very first paragraph of his Alexander<\/em> opinion, Alito states that \u201cas far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a significant statement, as it endorses a practice \u2014 partisan gerrymandering \u2014 that the Court has previously treated as unseemly. The Court\u2019s most significant previous opinion on partisan gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause<\/em><\/a> (2019), held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases challenging partisan maps, but it stopped short of saying that such maps are actually permissible under the Constitution. “<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “On top of all of this, Alexander<\/em> achieves another one of Alito\u2019s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he\u2019s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law<\/a>. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. \u201cWhen a federal court finds that race drove a legislature\u2019s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in \u2018offensive and demeaning conduct,\u2019\u201d Alito writes, before proclaiming that \u201cwe should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Alexander<\/em> is a very significant decision, and a very significant loss for proponents of fair legislative maps. The case is likely to cause partisan gerrymandering to proliferate in the United States even more than it already has.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n