Gerrymandering - Part II

Earlier this month UC Berkeley published Part I of a two-part series on gerrymandering, as referenced HERE at Left is Right. Part II is now out and well worth the read. Snippet:

Do you think that the Supreme Court’s motivation has anything to do with the fact that Republicans have set a new precedent by redistricting in Texas in 2002, only two years after the census? Maybe. I don't think you can read the crystal ball. Let me put it this way: I think most Court watchers were surprised they took this case. I sure was. In Bandemer they set the standard deliberately high, I've looked at the case pretty carefully, and there's certainly no indication that the Democrats have been shut out in any blatant way. That's one of the arguments for saying that political gerrymandering takes care of itself. To the extent that these are Congressional seats, it evens out. Voters change, they move around, they don't vote party lines as much anymore. You can try to stack it up, but things tend to balance out over the years anyway. One year it's the Republicans screwing the Democrats and the very same year, in another state, it's the opposite. But regardless of whether it balances out numbers-wise, doesn’t the fact that close to 400 of the 435 House members don’t have to face competitive elections mean that they can afford to be more partisan and less conciliatory? That's an old story. Do you know that it was said back in the 1950s and 1960s that there was greater turnover in the Dumas of the Soviet Union than there was in the House of Representatives? Although it does strike me that both sides have become more aggressive in Congress, yes. Look at what the Democrats are doing to the nomination of judges. In the current case, Pennsylvania 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 unfair? That is the issue that will dictate the outcome of the case: Can the Court refine its 1986 standard determining whether a political gerrymander is unconstitutional and decide whether it has been met in this case? I doubt that they'll significantly change what the standard is. They may well send it back to the lower court and say, "You've used the wrong standard. We agree that we didn't give you much to work with, so now we’ll give you some more." There's another potential outcome. They might get five votes for the proposition that they made a mistake in 1986. Two justices of the current court, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor, took the position in 1986 that the court had no business in this area — that gerrymandering should be a political question, which simply means that anything goes. One argument in support of that is that there hasn’t been a violation since 1986. And it's possible that they'll get five votes for that proposition. Justice O'Connor is normally the swing vote, she was a member of a state legislature, so she's pretty savvy about redistricting.