TODAY, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court Could Deal A Fatal Blow To Gerrymandering

As we mentioned late Friday, today is D-Day for gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. Yes... TODAY. There are 3 gerrymandering lawsuits wending their way through the courts in Harrisburg and the first one makes its judicial splash today. "The litigation," reported Reuters on Sunday, "is part of a growing set of legal challenges to partisan redistricting, including a U.S. Supreme Court case out of Wisconsin that could for the first time establish a constitutional standard to measure the legality of such map-making. The high court is scheduled to decide that case by June 2018, five months before the midterm elections.

In addition to the state case, two pending federal lawsuits also challenge the district lines as unconstitutional. Legal observers consider the state lawsuit the most likely to succeed in time for the voting next November.

The Democratic-majority state Supreme Court has ordered the presiding judge to render his decision by Dec. 31. The high court will then determine whether to accept his ruling or issue its own conclusions.

The state lawsuit asserts the redistricting included numerous examples of blatantly partisan lines.

It's so complicated that Reuters then flubbed the whole thing, writing that "Democrat-dominated Reading, one of the most economically depressed cities in the state, was carved out of the 6th district and placed into the reliably Democratic 13th, a move the plaintiffs said was intended to render the city’s votes meaningless." What reporter Joseph Ax should have written was "Democrat-dominated Reading, one of the most economically depressed cities in the state, was carved out of the 6th district and placed into the reliably Republican 16th, a move the plaintiffs said was intended to render the city’s votes meaningless." Reading's Democratic voters are swamped by Lancaster County's huge Republican majorities. If Reading was still part of the 6th, the 6th, a more swingy district, would be a safe blue district. I remember when my old friend Aryanna Strader (now Lt. Governor candidate Aryanna Berringer) ran against entrenched Republican Joe Pitts in the 16th in 2012. There are 3 counties (or parts of counties) in the 16th-- Berks, whose county seat in Reading, Chester and Lancaster. There were about 30,000 votes that came out of Reading and it was a landslide for Aryanna. She beat Pitts 65-30%. Chester County, which provided around 38,000 votes, is more swingy and Pitts was ahead by a nose-- 48-47%. But when Lancaster County came in, it was clear what the Republican legislators had done-- close to 190,000 votes from an exceedingly red county made Reading's voters meaningless. Pitts won Lancaster Co. 125,310 (60%) to 69,033 (33%).

Ax got his next example quote right though. It demonstrates another GOP tactic legislators use to make Democratic votes meaningless-- exactly what they did to blue, blue Austin, Texas, for example. "Montgomery County," he wrote, "where state senator Leach lives, has approximately 820,000 residents, slightly more than the 711,000 needed for a single congressional district, but has been sliced into five separate districts." Ax reported that Daylin Leach, the progressive lion of the state's Democrats, "is running in one of the country’s most gerrymandered congressional districts, one with such a twisting, winding shape that it has earned the derisive nickname 'Goofy Kicking Donald Duck.' The 7th congressional district has become a national poster child for critics of gerrymandering, the process by which one party draws district boundaries to ensure an advantage among voters. Democrats say the lines have helped Republicans like U.S. Representative Patrick Meehan, the four-term incumbent Leach seeks to unseat, to stay in office... Leach said he would make gerrymandering a campaign issue. 'It’s theft of democracy,' Leach said. 'This is horribly destructive.'... The 7th district is so precisely engineered that at one point it narrows to the width of a single seafood restaurant, snaking past two other congressional districts so it can link two far flung Republican-leaning areas."

“Three congressional districts all converge on this spot,” Leach said from the parking lot at Creed’s Seafood and Steaks last week, as cars whizzed overhead on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

“This is the sixth; over there is the seventh; and down that road is the 13th,” he said, pointing in several directions. “This is what gerrymandering looks like on the ground.”

...Critics of gerrymandering say it helps explain why Pennsylvania has sent 13 Republicans and only five Democrats to the U.S. House since the 2011 redistricting, despite being a closely divided swing state.

...The Democrats have targeted six Republican-held districts in the state as part of their quest to pick up the 24 House seats they need to overturn the Republicans, who also have a Senate majority and President Donald Trump in the White House.

Democrats need to win the nationwide popular vote by at least 10 points in 2018 to do so, in part because of gerrymandered lines, according to Michael Li, a redistricting expert and lawyer at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“Pennsylvania is probably the most aggressive of the gerrymanders,” he said. “You look at some of the maps in the Philadelphia suburbs, and it looks like a 4-year-old just slapped paint around.”

The non-partisan League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania sued the state in June, arguing the maps violate the state constitution by depriving residents of a meaningful vote.

The litigation is part of a growing set of legal challenges to partisan redistricting, including a U.S. Supreme Court case out of Wisconsin that could for the first time establish a constitutional standard to measure the legality of such map-making. The high court is scheduled to decide that case by June 2018, five months before the midterm elections.

“The politicians are not supposed to pick their voters; the voters are supposed to elect their leaders,” said Mimi McKenzie, an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center who represents the League of Women Voters and other Pennsylvania voters.

Last week Rep. Matt Cartwright told us that ""Pennsylvania’s Congressional map is an abomination, a perfect example of politicians selecting their voters, instead of vice versa. I think we are fortunate to have a majority on the state Supreme Court willing to dive into this question and fix our preternaturally bollocksed up Congressional boundaries. It is hard to imagine that any tribunal could conclude that this map is not violative of any reasonable standard of electoral fairness. The real question is the one you have asked at the beginning:  whether the Supreme Court has the will to race time and put a new map in place for 2018. My prediction is that the Olympic-caliber foot-dragging Republicans in Harrisburg will test the high court’s resolve-- to do the right thing-- to the utmost."

Yesterday we discussed it with Daylin Leach again and he told us that when he started talking about the evils of gerrymandering 15 years ago, "I felt like I was talking to myself. It was on nobody's radar. Now, the issue is popping, and I'm extremely gratified that we appear to be finally on the precipice of progress on this insult to democracy. Hopefully, the courts will deal with this in a thoughtful, but aggressive way to consign the theft of votes that gerrymandering is to the ash heap of history."