Gerry the Salamander

Interesting piece, in UC Berkeley News, regarding the Pennsylvania gerrymandering/congressional redistricting case that the Supreme Court is addressing this year. Good introduction about the history of gerrymandering, followed by an interview with Bruce Cain (the Robson Professor of Political Science and director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies). Snippet:

In the Pennsylvania case now before the Supreme Court, Democrats are arguing that it is "unconstitutional to give a state's million Republicans control over ten seats while leaving a million Democrats with control over five." Is it unconstitutional or merely politics as usual? Some Democrats are arguing that. Back when Phil Burton drew the lines in California [as a state congressman in 1981], it was Republicans who were claiming unfairness and wanted the court to intervene. The shoe was on the other foot in Indiana in the 1980s or Pennsylvania in the year 2003. The aggressor claims immunity from the court and the victims want the courts to protect them. Why do you think the court agreed to hear this case now? There are two theories floating around. The first is that the court's seriously interested in getting involved in adjudicating these gerrymandering cases. Theory No. 2 is that the court wants to drive a stake into the heart of the 1986 Bandemer decision, which extended the prohibition on racial gerrymandering to political gerrymandering. But in the intervening years since then, there have been no rulings that have used Bandemer to deem a redistricting plan unconstitutional. Isn't that because Bandemer's standard of determining unconstitutionality — that a political party has to be "entirely shut out of the process" — is so vague as to be useless? It's not so much vague as it is tough. Basically the court set the threshold very high — you have to show that this party has been systematically excluded from power, has no way to address this inequity, and that the gerrymandering is part of this exclusion. That's not true in most cases, even in hard-core Democratic and Republican states. California is a hard-core Democratic state, but our new governor is a Republican. So such exclusion, which was borrowed from the racial gerrymandering cases, is a very, very high standard to apply to political gerrymandering. No plan has risen to the level of constitutional significance since the Bandemer definition. So it's quite possible that the court wants to say explicitly, "Don't give us any more of this nonsense, we set the bar very high on purpose and we're not going to be drawn into this because it's a fundamentally political fight."