Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing districts to give one political party an advantage in as many districts as possible while consolidating the other party's voters into as few as possible.
The death of Justice Antonin Scalia left many Supreme Court decisions up in the air.
In particular, a set of decisions on redistricting could lead to a sea change in election laws and leave Democrats breathing easier.
Currently, states can draw election districts to benefit the party in power and face limited consequences.
A series of major redistricting cases the court is set to decide before the end of June could result in outcomes more favorable to Democrats and voting rights advocates.
In Arizona, Republicans challenged districts drawn by the state's independent redistricting commission.
In Virginia, a lower court ruled that the GOP unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts to dilute the voting strength of African-Americans.
In Texas, Republican plaintiffs want to upend current redistricting practices, in which state legislative districts are drawn according to population, and instead require state legislatures to draw districts based on the number of eligible voters in each district.
A ruling in their favor would shift political power from Democratic-leaning urban centers to rural, Republican-leaning areas, but voting rights experts are optimistic that the court will decide to preserve the status quo.
In 2004, the court split on the question of whether Republicans in Pennsylvania drew district maps that were unconstitutional.
Four conservatives -- Justices William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Clarence Thomas and Scalia -- ruled that there were no standards enabling the court to decide partisan gerrymandering claims.
Anthony Kennedy, the court’s current swing vote, didn’t foreclose the possibility that such standards could be delineated in the future.
The court's four more liberal justice said they would police partisan gerrymandering and laid out standards for how they would do that.
Only one of the justices who opposed scrutinizing partisan gerrymandering remains on the court today, giving voting rights advocates hope that, if the court revisits the issue, it could decide it does have the power to intervene to correct overly partisan districts.
If Obama overcomes Republican opposition in the Senate and gets it to confirm a replacement for Scalia, or if Democrats retake the Senate and keep the White House in November’s general election, partisan gerrymandering could come under more judicial scrutiny.
In that case, states would have more of an incentive to de-politicize their redistricting processes and draw more competitive districts.
If gerrymandering continues unabated, Democrats will struggle to retake the House.
In 2012, for instance, Democratic House candidates received nearly 1.4 million more votes than GOP candidates, yet Republicans maintained their disproportionate majority in the chamber, due in part to favorable district boundaries drawn by their counterparts in state legislatures.
There’s no sign that this trend will change absent intervention from the Supreme Court.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/supreme-court-redistricting-voting_us_56c62f60e4b0928f5a6b4701