Court throws power to draw political districts to elected officials

A sharply splintered US Supreme Court has set the stage for what will be one of the most politically bruising rounds of congressional redistricting ever.

In upholding a Pennsylvania redistricting plan that gives a clear advantage to Republican candidates in a state with an evenly split party registration, a four-judge plurality of the nation's highest court said it is up to elected political leaders - not judges - to determine how congressional election districts should be drawn.

But the court came one vote shy of barring judicial oversight in such cases. While the plurality justices declined to enter a political fray over highly partisan efforts to draw congressional districts that favor one party over another on election day, Justice Anthony Kennedy refused to go that far.

The Constitution does not provide "a judicially enforceable limit on the political considerations that the states and Congress may take into account when districting," writes Justice Antonin Scalia, in the plurality decision joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and Justice Clarence Thomas.

The decision will do little to quell similar political brawls over congressional redistricting in Texas, Colorado, and Georgia. And it will likely spark more intense battles elsewhere, including efforts to redraw district lines every two years rather than the customary practice of every 10 years following the Census.

Political analysts say the ruling will only accelerate the trend toward noncompetitive races for congressional seats.

"It takes the ref off the field," says Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute. "What they've done with this opinion is to leave the floodgates open for a kind of process that ... has led to the destructive, acrimonious, partisan politics and frequent gridlock that we now have."

Jack Krill, the Harrisburg, Pa., lawyer who argued to uphold the Pennsylvania plan, said the decision should help reduce the litigation over redistricting after every Census. "Even though we didn't get a full majority..., the net result will be to put to rest claims of too much politics in what is essentially a political process," he says.

In reaching its decision, the four-justice plurality said it would overturn an 18-year high court precedent holding that, under certain circumstances, political gerrymandering could go too far by violating constitutional principles underlying the concept of one person, one vote. The plurality said the goal of achieving "fairness" had proved impossible for courts to enforce.

"Fairness is not a judicially manageable standard," Justice Scalia writes. "Some criterion more solid and more demonstrably met than that is necessary to enable state legislatures to discern the limits of their districting discretion, to meaningfully constrain the courts' discretion, and to win public acceptance for the courts' intrusion into a process that is the very foundation of democratic decisionmaking."

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