The Politics of Gerrymandering
WELLS, DAVID J.
INDIANA'S TEST CASE The Politics of Gerrymandering DAVID I. WELLS On October 7, the U.S. Supreme Court listened to argument in an unusual and potentially momentous case. The chief opponents were...
...Many political observers nevertheless find gerrymandering rather amusing...
...Predictably, local and congressional election districts were realigned to perpetuate the party's power...
...This forces them into a head-on primary clash, unless one of them agrees to run in a new, disadvantageous area or, better yet, to retire...
...Upon completion of the 1980 census, every state had to redraw the boundaries of its legislative and congressional districts to take account of population movements in the previous decade...
...This approach produces the kinds of outlandish configurations people generally associate with gerrymandering...
...Similar reasoning has prompted California's Democratic congressional delegation to enter the case on the Indiana Republicans' side...
...By accepting the appeal the justices set the stage for what will be a landmark decision, regardless of the outcome...
...This procedure does not necessarily yield bizarre shapes...
...I am convinced," wrote Stevens about gerrymandering in a 198 3 concurring opinion, "that the judiciary is not powerless to provide a constitutional remedy in egregious cases...
...The strategy takes many forms...
...As urban areas grew, rural-dominated legislatures simply refused to accept a revised distribution of seats to reflect internal migration...
...It would jeopardize entrenched centers of power of both parties, and would allow fresh blood and fresh air into the system as a whole...
...Proving its existence is not easy, they argue, and neither is framing rules to eliminate it...
...2. Does it clearly and without acceptable explanation delineate districts that, on their face, raise suspicions of partisan manipulation...
...In New York State, for instance, Republicans invariably fragment Rochester and Syracuse, which frequently vote Democratic, and attach the severed pieces to safe GOP territories outside those cities, thereby producing reliably Republican districts...
...The chief opponents were the Democratic and Republican parties of Indiana...
...The State—in reality, the GOP, for Governor Robert Orr is a Republican—immediately appealed to the U.S...
...Constitution by effectively favoring the Republicans...
...The original ruling by the three-judge panel actually set off political alarm bells throughout the United States, and especially among the Democrats, because they dominated more state legislatures than their rivals during the post-1980 re-districting and consequently have more to lose...
...Yet of the 30 Democratic legislatures, 16 are in the South and in border states...
...Unusual alignments indeed...
...But the practice is not a joke—unless you think establishing classes of politically privileged and deprived individuals, thwarting the will of the voters, and making legislatures virtually immune from political change for at least a decade is funny...
...This task is generally carried out by the legislature, and in Indiana in 1981 the Republicans had majorities in both houses...
...The Indiana case is perhaps the perfect vehicle for Supreme Court action in this area...
...At Stake, it needs to be remembered, is control not simply of the state-houses but also of the U.S...
...In the aftermath of the legal upheaval of the '60s, it was resorted to with growing frequency...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, the favorable decision secured by Indiana's Democrats was seen by their California brethren as a dire threat...
...3. If the answer to both questions is yes, can the state nonetheless produce evidence that the plan serves neutral, legitimate interests...
...But lined up alongside the lawyers for the Indiana Democrats in the august chamber were colleagues representing the Republican National Committee (RNC), as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...No one will be able to accuse the Court of making a partisan decision...
...The State GOP tried several times to overturn this Democratic gerrymander—through the initiative and referendum process as well as through legal action—without success...
...The upshot was that urban (and later suburban) areas found themselves with much less clout than their numbers entitled them to have...
...The trick is to "stuff' adjacent districts it is ready to concede anyway with as many opposition voters as possible...
...Finally, fVes-berry v. Sanders (1964) extended the principle to congressional constituencies...
...Today, thanks to the elimination of urban underrepresentation, Democrats control the greater number of legislatures and partisan disproportion in Congress is a thing of the past...
...Back in the 1960s, when almost every state's apportionment laws were successfully David I. Wells, associate director of the International Ladies Garment H orkers' Union political department, was the plaintiff in Wells v. Rockefeller...
...A second type of gerrymandering, used in those parts of a state where the top party constitutes the normal majority, is meant to chop up isolated opposition strongholds...
...In eight others a different party reigns in each house, and one Legislature is nonpartisan...
...The defendants openly admit that they gerrymandered, and Democrats and Republicans are neatly offsetting one another on both sides of the question...
...Gerrymandering in America dates back at least to the days of Elbridge Gerry, the early 19th-century Democratic governor of Massachusetts, who had a salamander-shaped district crafted to help keep the Federalists in opposition...
...The latter include Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court member who has been most outspoken in his views on the subj ect...
...The legislatures of 30 states have Democratic majorities in both houses, while the GOP fully controls 11...
...Whatever it is, members of each party will be loudly cheering and booing—at the same time...
...In fact, the congressional boundaries, devised by the late Representative Phil Burton of SanFran-cisco, gave Democrats a blatant advantage, creating districts with grossly convoluted borders and even one in the Bay Area composed of three unconnected segments...
...challenged on the grounds that they established districts with unequal populations, several lawsuits also sought to have the judiciary declare gerrymandering unconstitutional...
...Numerical malapportionment benefited Republicans and conservatives, and penalized Democrats and liberals...
...Where the party that controls a state is weak in certain areas, it might string together small, often widely separated pockets of strength to form districts it can reasonably expect to win...
...Within a few years, entrenched rural interests gave way to the representatives of urban and suburban America, who at long last had a reasonable opportunity to shape the law...
...A third maneuver involves pitting two popular incumbent opposition legislators against each other in a single merged district...
...As a result, the end of gerrymandering would not benefit only one party or ideological viewpoint...
...House of Representatives...
...On a subtler level, in a state gerrymandered by Democrats, for example, it can significantly cut the loss of seats during "Republican years" and swell normal gains when the political winds are blowing in the opposite direction...
...Since that time, although the courts have dealt in great detail with many aspects of legislative representation, they have refused to confront gerrymandering...
...California was the most important predominantly Democratic state after the last census...
...In other words, the Hoosier lawmakers engaged in the traditional American practice of gerrymandering: carving out constituencies in ways calculated to give one party or group a distinct advantage...
...Reynolds v. S/ms(1964), the "one man, one vote" ruling, required state legislative districts to have approximately equalpopulations...
...Since at present Democrats run more state governments than the Republicans do, many pundits assume that, in the short run at any rate, an antigerryman-dering decision would significantly help the nation's conservatives...
...it has been placed in sharp focus...
...The state Democratic organization then resolved to fight the redistricting in the Federal courts, charging that it violated the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S...
...which invalidated two successive Sew )'ork congressional redistricting laws...
...In only 14 states are legislatures led by Northern, "national" Democrats, who therefore do not enjoy a dramatic advantage over the Republicans...
...Here they cannot evade the fundamental issue of gerrymandering...
...While they were permitted, the dominant conservative forces had relatively little need to employ the other method, gerrymandering...
...At the extreme it can transform a party that wins a majority at the polls into a minority in the Legislature's chambers...
...Seeking such relief was not new...
...If anything, some of the Supreme Court's rulings promoted gerrymandering, condoning its use to increase the representation of racial minorities...
...the boundary lines are often deceptively straight...
...Gerrymandering quite effectively distorts elections...
...The Supreme Court ducked the issue, however, limiting its rulings to numerical inequalities...
...So a Court ruling that doomed gerrymandering would not be the political disaster some Democrats fear...
...Unless it does, he added, "the promise of Baker v. Carrand Reynolds v. Sims, that judicially manageable standards can assure 'full and effective participation by all citizens,' may never be fulfilled...
...The shift amounted to a political revolution—but an unfinished one, because unequal electoral districts were not the only means of achieving unwarranted political leverage...
...For most of the 20th century, though, political power was protected by maintaining constituencies of very unequal populations, not by cleverly manipulating boundaries...
...They laugh at the inventive cartography that muffles the opposition, at the sheer outrageousness of the twisting, writhing, contorted boundaries that wriggle in and out of city blocks and suburban lanes...
...The first contest under Indiana's new electoral map took place in 1982, and the plan worked as intended: The Democrats won a clear majority (just under 52 per cent) of the votes cast for the Legislature's lower house, yet ended up with only 43 per cent of the seats...
...That is why the RNC has filed an amicus curiae brief vigorously opposing its own Indiana affiliate and supporting the local Democrats...
...In addition, it can discourage competent would-be challengers who live in redesigned districts they know are impregnable, leaving weak or just plain bad legislators in office merely because they are protected...
...The Indiana case broke the pattern: A three-judge panel agreed that the plaintiffs had been denied their rights and ordered a new round of redistricting...
...Others who have focused on the issue reject this contention...
...Still, for 20 years the courts ignored the fact that the two techniques are merely varieties of the same basic evil...
...This would appear to indicate a 3:1 Democratic edge...
...Supreme Court, contending that the matter was a "political" one outsideFederaljurisdic-tion...
...The district lines they framed, with the assistance of a prominent GOP-orient-ed computer firm, were openly and admittedly designed to ensure continued Republican majorities during the coming decade...
...Baker v. Carr( 1962) declared that the Federal bench does have jurisdiction over thesubject...
...House...
...All this changed quite suddenly in the early '60s when, following a spate of failed efforts to induce the judiciary to deal with malapportionment, the Supreme Court upended the whole system in a momentous series of decisions...
...Despite recent changes, the local Democratic Party is not notably liberal in these places...
...To understand how they emerged we must go back a few years...
...A Supreme Court decision declaring gerrymandering unconstitutional would shake the foundations of American politics almost as much as the one man, one vote rulings did, with a noteworthy difference...
...Such reasoning is deceptive...
...He believes it is possible to establish a "judicially manageable standard" for cases charging gerrymandering, and has even suggested a three-part test for adjudicating them: 1. Does the challenged plan have a significant adverse impact on an identifiable political group...
...Outside the South, theDemocraticPar-ty's strength was centered in the cities, so these injustices gave a consistent and highly significant advantage to the Republicans and the nation's conservatives...
...Apologists for the status quo claim that in contrast to unequal apportionment, where the inequities could be quantified and remedied by establishing clear numerical standards, gerrymandering is not readily conducive to judicial intervention...
...Across I he aisle, at the table with the legal spokesmen of the Indiana Republicans, were attorneys for California's Democratic congressional delegation and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund...
...A quarter century ago, conservatives held almost every legislature and were heavily overrepresented in the U.S...
...What is more, for a true picture we should at the minimum really add the 11 "Confederate" states lo theconservativeside, which then leads 22 to 14...
Vol. 68 • October 1985 • No. 13
