By Elsie Kamsiyochi
A series of recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing sharply partisan congressional maps to stand has underscored how a landmark 2019 decision helped ignite an all-out political arms race over redistricting—one that many legal scholars and voters say is eroding American democracy.
At the center of the controversy is the court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that federal courts have no authority to intervene in cases of partisan gerrymandering.
By removing the judiciary as a referee, the decision effectively gave state legislatures a green light to redraw voting districts primarily to benefit their own political parties, so long as race was not the dominant factor.
That ruling is now reverberating nationwide as states push aggressively partisan maps ahead of November’s midterm elections, contests that will play a decisive role in shaping the presidency of Donald Trump and control of Congress.
Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, making even a handful of seats critical to the balance of power.
The escalation began in earnest when Texas, at Trump’s urging, redrew its congressional map last year in a bid to flip as many as five Democratic-held seats to Republicans.
California soon responded in kind, unveiling a new map designed to swing up to five Republican seats to Democrats. As the nation’s two most populous states—and the ones with the largest House delegations—their moves set off a tit-for-tat scramble that quickly spread elsewhere.
Democrats have pursued favorable redraws in states such as Virginia, Maryland and New York, while Republicans have done the same in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida.
Legal experts say this wave of mid-decade redistricting is highly unusual. Traditionally, voting maps are redrawn only after the once-a-decade census to reflect population changes, not repeatedly in response to shifting political calculations.
“This is unprecedented in the modern era,” said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas, noting that the practice had largely disappeared after Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s established the principle of equal representation.
Now, he said, Rucho has combined with hyper-polarized politics to create “a race to the bottom.”
The Supreme Court itself has reinforced that perception. In December, the justices allowed Texas’s Republican-leaning map to be used, even after a lower court found it was likely an unlawful racial gerrymander.
This month, the court similarly cleared the way for California’s Democratic-friendly map. In both cases, the states argued that partisan goals—not race—were the primary motivation, a distinction that has become increasingly central to redistricting battles.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Rucho, acknowledged that extreme gerrymandering can appear “unjust” and “incompatible with democratic principles.”
Still, he argued that drawing political lines is an inherently political task best left to legislatures, not judges, whose involvement could itself appear partisan.
Critics counter that the hands-off approach has hollowed out democratic accountability. Harvard Law School professor Nick Stephanopoulos called extreme gerrymandering “the most anti-democratic practice in modern American politics,” arguing that it produces legislatures that do not reflect the will of the electorate. Without enforceable federal limits, he said, there is little incentive for restraint.
Public opinion appears to back that concern. In an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, 61% of Americans—including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans—said recent redistricting efforts in states like Texas and California were bad for democracy.
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and former White House voting-rights adviser, summed up the sentiment bluntly: “Voters fervently hate this—and they’re right to hate it.”
Supporters of the Rucho ruling argue that it prevents courts from being dragged into overtly political disputes and leaves redistricting to elected bodies.
Advances in technology, however, have made it easier than ever for lawmakers to fine-tune districts down to individual census blocks, maximizing partisan advantage with scientific precision.
The result is a system in which, as critics often put it, politicians are choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians. With both major parties now openly embracing that logic, the gerrymandering arms race shows little sign of slowing—and the long-term consequences for representative democracy remain an open and deeply contentious question.
Source Reuters
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