Justice Anthony Kennedy agreed in that case but left the door open to future Supreme Court action if a judicially discernible and manageable standard were ever found.
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Wall implicitly answered the question anyway.
The court traditionally begins its annual session on the first Monday of October.
Alito said the metrics drawn from social science and endorsed by the lower court for gauging that electoral districts are too partisan are themselves full of questions. Whether that means Justice Kennedy is ready to vote for limits to partisan gerrymandering remains to be seen, but if his retirement next summer is more than a rumour, Mr Smith’s plea may be ringing in his ears. In 2004, the court heard a similar case, in which Democratic voters in Pennsylvania argued they were disenfranchised by the state’s maps because they were overly partisan. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared to agree, and expressed fear that partisan gerrymanders effectively deter people from voting, to the extent that they might feel their vote is irrelevant to the outcome.
In a previous case, in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that immigrants facing deportation may “be detained for the brief period” required to resolve their cases.
The court battles are at the forefront of Democrats’ bid to win back the almost 1,000 state legislative seats the party lost during Barack Obama’s presidency – a blow that Obama himself is now attempting to help reverse by raising money for the redistricting group. However consequential these issues may be, they pale in comparison with two cases before the Supreme Court that could remake the immigration debate. We will most likely know in June whether the Court’s right flank managed to pull him back into their fold.
Wisconsin Republicans controlled the redistricting process that followed the once-every-decade census because they held the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature.
Republicans returned to the Capitol last January with a 64-35 seat majority in the state Assembly and a 20-13 advantage in the Senate.
This wasn’t just a problem in Wisconsin. “D.R. Horton was the first to make that move, and that’s a pretty radical move, to say for the first time that NLRA overrides those other statutes”, Wall said. She said independent commissions in other states have become corrupt and they are not accountable to the voters, like legislators.
A Democratic group led by former Attorney General Eric Holder has accused Georgia Republicans of gerrymandering two state legislative districts in order to minimize African-American voters’ impact on elections.
Danielle Lang, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center also representing the challengers, noted that in 2012 Republicans received 49% of the statewide vote and 60 seats. Democrat voters challenged the voter districts that Republican lawmakers drew in 2011, arguing they crossed a constitutional line in manipulating maps for Republican advantage.
Electoral maps sometimes concentrate voters who tend to favor the minority party into a small number of districts to reduce their statewide voting power – called packing – and distribute the rest of those voters in other districts in numbers too small to be a majority – called cracking.
Chief Justice John Roberts was skeptical of that test during Tuesday’s arguments. As Paul Smith, the attorney arguing against Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps in Whitford, told the Court, if the justices allow such aggressive gerrymanders to persist, “the country is going to lose faith in democracy”.
Spakovsky said, “If the Supreme Court recognizes political gerrymandering as a violation of the Constitution, I think it will cause chaos throughout the country”.
Several of the more liberal-leaning justices seemed deeply skeptical of the idea that immigrants, even those who had just shown up at the border to ask for asylum and had no community ties to the United States, would be afforded no protections against arbitrary detention.
“Politicians are never going to fix gerrymandering”.
But earlier, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said the court should be able to come to an agreement on a simple three-part test for invalidating partisan gerrymanders: Were the maps drawn under one-party control? The Wisconsin map “was the most partisan” map possible.
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That’s what happened – when legislatures bothered to redraw the lines at all. Then, they could determine if the partisan advantage under the map was particularly extreme. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch did not ask any questions.
