Republicans trailed by one touchdown and had half the field remaining in Wisconsin for redistricting the state legislature. However, the Supreme Court’s shocker decision has forced overtime.
Previously, Wisconsin’s highest court had decided to use maps drawn by the Democrat governor after a months-long battle with Republican lawmakers. The Supreme Court ruled that several legal issues were incorrectly ignored and the process was halted. Yet, the bigger story here isn’t actually about Wisconsin, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
It was as expected that the teeth gnashing began instantly.
It is a shocking decision. A Republican justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted these maps. It was called a Hail Mary appeal and won. It is a shocking decision. https://t.co/i5r4D0eqcj
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 23, 2022
I’m not a lawyer, and this decision is in the weeds a bit, but here is a good explainer from a left-wing Supreme Court analyst. You can ignore the confusion in the writing, because the details of what happened are clear.
According to the majority, it basically states this: There was an impasse between Democratic Governor and Republican Legislature over the drawing of district lines. The court was forced to draw the lines first. This set out criteria, basically saying that the parties must propose maps that are the least changed from those of the previous decade. The court adopted the Governor’s maps, and those maps added another majority-minority district around Milwaukee. Because Section 2 of the VRA would have been violated if the districts were not drawn, the Governor added the new district. When the state supreme court adopted the Governor’s maps, it left open the possibility that they could be challenged later as violating the VRA or as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander (a Shaw claim), violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In this fast-track litigation, the District Lines were not fully discussed.
The Supreme Court’s opinion today says either the Governor or the Supreme Court misapplied the Supreme Court’s VRA and racial gerrymandering precedents, in part by elevating just one of the VRA GinglesFactors (proportionality). According to the court, the VRA should have been interpreted in light of the racial cases. It also requires the creation of majority-minority areas only after strict scrutiny is conducted. The state supreme court should have considered under strict scrutiny “whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”
To summarize, Democrat Gov. Tony Evers submitted a redistricting proposal that included another majority-black area, elevating proportionality over all other factors. In adopting that map, the state’s high court failed to analyze whether the district could have been drawn in a neutral fashion without resorting to racial gerrymandering. This case will be returned to the high court for a reexamination and proper adjudication.
This is the Supreme Court’s latest move to restrict the Voting Rights act from being used as a partisan tool by Democrats to racially-gerrymander for political gain. Over the decades, Democrat officeholders use the VRA test to determine proportionality in order to retain power in predominantly urban areas. They ignore all other factors. These practices are being challenged by the Supreme Court’s conservatives, who have not allowed them to continue for many years.
This has caused panic among the Left, as the VRA is a major resource in maintaining power. So, while I don’t know how this Wisconsin case will ultimately turn out, that’s actually a secondary concern here. What’s far more noteworthy in all this is that the Supreme Court is continuing to scrutinize the VRA and its application, specifically in cases where it is being used as cover for partisan redistricting.
In the end, Democrats aren’t freaking out because of the possibility of losing a single, state-level district in Wisconsin. Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan are not concerned about it. Rather, they are freaking out because this decision is much farther reaching and could completely nuke the left’s “cheat code” regarding redistricting in the future.
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