Supreme Court sidesteps decision on partisan gerrymandering in rulings on Wisconsin, Maryland casesWashington Post, Jun 18, 2018, Robert Barnes
The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a decision on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, ruling against the challengers of a Republican-drawn map in Wisconsin and a Democratic redistricting in Maryland.
The decisions in the separate cases once again puts off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional.
It was a technical resolution of what has seemed to hold the promise of being a landmark decision about whether extreme efforts to give one party advantage over another were unconstitutional.
While the court routinely polices the drawing of electoral maps to combat racial gerrymandering, it has never found that partisan efforts went too far. It has never settled on a test that judges could use to determine how much politics was too much.
There is a pending challenge of North Carolina’s redistricting efforts that could provide another case for the justices to consider the issue.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-sidesteps-decision-on-partisan-gerrymandering/2018/06/18/c909bf26-7303-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4b12eba41079
