Federal Court Hands Ohio Republicans Another Stinging Blow Over Gerrymandering

Some good news on the Ohio gerrymandering front. About a week ago, we reported that a federal court had struck down Ohio's pernicious Republican gerrymandered congressional maps. Needless to say, the pernicious Republicans immediately started screaming like stuck pigs and appealed. On Thursday a three judge panel told them to tell it to the hand, saying "it would not place a hold on an order that required Ohio to redraw its congressional district map. within a matter a weeks. No way on the delay!

The panel wrote that “no new arguments persuade the Court that a stay is now warranted.”

Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and said he will also now ask the high court to stay the panel’s order.

The three-judge panel unanimously ruled Friday that Ohio’s gerrymandered congressional district map is unconstitutional. The judges found that the map “dilutes the votes of Democratic voters by packing and cracking them into districts that are so skewed toward one party that the electoral outcome is predetermined.”

The judges ordered Ohio to draw and implement a new map by June 14.

The panel’s order denying a stay chided the state for attempting to re-litigate the case “and avoid the Court’s finding and conclusion that the current map is unconstitutional and has thus harmed voters." It went on to say it was important to move forward with the process “so that the voters in Ohio can avoid another election with unconstitutionally drawn districts.”

Yost, in a prepared statement Thursday afternoon, said he would appeal what he called the "invented legal standard in the trial court’s decision, and will ask the Supreme Court to stay the decision pending its ruling on similar cases already before it.”

The attorney general on Monday filed notice of an appeal to the high court, which is currently weighing separate gerrymandering cases out of North Carolina and Maryland. Yost argued that those cases, which could be decided with weeks, could lead to a reversal of the Ohio decision.

The state made a similar argument earlier in unsuccessfully seeking a delay in trial, which took place in Cincinnati in March.

Advocates who brought the suit, including the Ohio League of Women Voters with representation by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said in a court filing Wednesday night that “this Court already refused an invitation to participate in the folly of ‘predicting what the Supreme Court might do’ ... It should reject that same invitation again."

In court filings leading up the the ruling, the state said it must have a map by Sept. 20 in order to prepare for the 2020 election.

Republican leaders, in creating the current map after the 2010 census, designed districts capable of withstanding swings in voter sentiment to reliably elect 12 Republicans and four Democrats statewide. The results have been exactly as planned in the four elections with the map, with Republicans winning 75 percent of the races with just over half of the overall vote.

In addition to the pending U.S. Supreme Court cases from Maryland (brought by Republicans) and North Carolina (brought by Democrats), a federal judge panel in Michigan recently ordered the redrawing the lines for several Statehouse and congressional districts there.

Pennsylvania used a new congressional map last year, under order by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn that ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 ruled that partisan gerrymandering could violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, but left ambiguous the standard by which courts might rule on such claims.

The most likely non-partisan redrawing of the electoral map will mean instead of 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats in the Ohio congressional delegation, there will be 8 Republicans, 7 Democrats and an ultra-swingy district that will be too tough to predict from cycle to cycle.