Rucho not the last word on partisan gerrymanders

Last month's election in Virginia marked another important victory against excessively partisan gerrymanders in America.

Virginia voters, despite being corralled into state legislative districts unfairly drawn to assure re-election of the incumbent party, finally overwhelmed Virginia's gerrymander with a massive countervailing statewide vote and restored self-government to the Old Dominion.

Democracy prevailing in one of the United States ought not to be so newsworthy, and that is itself the historic news.

Virginia is the latest state to begin unshackling its voters from the anti-democratic constraints of partisan gerrymanders. Those constraints reached unprecedented extremes in the past decade, in an unprecedented number of places in America, making virtual banana republics of several states, and de-legitimizing a Republican U.S. House majority over-stocked with partisans from brazenly gerrymandered congressional districts.

It started in 2010 when that year's "wave" election delivered to Republicans both the governorships and state house majorities in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia. This gave Republicans exclusive control of voter district map-making in each of these states, unchallenged by out-of-power Democrats and unchecked by the courts. They harnessed that monopoly power to an aggressive multi-state gerrymandering strategy in 2011, dubbed "RedMap," that locked-in state legislative super-majorities that even tsunamis of Democratic votes would leave high and dry, election after election.

During the past decade, Republicans maintained majorities in each of these states despite Democratic candidates receiving millions more statewide votes. And there were national implications for these state-level antics, as every two years perhaps two dozen more Republican members of Congress were sent to Washington, from these six states alone, than would have been sent there with un-biased maps.

Voting rights advocates fighting gerrymanders sought largely in vain for help from the courts. This summer the U.S. Supreme Court, in Rucho v. Common Cause, while acknowledging gerrymanders are fundamentally "incompatible with democratic principles," definitively ruled out future involvement by the federal courts in such "political questions," declining to use the U.S. Constitution to deliver the hoped-for nationwide knockout punch.

But a steady succession of body blows at the state level, in the courts and at the ballot box, have taken their toll on the RedMap gerrymanders. There is justified expectation now that much fairer maps will be forthcoming when decennial redistricting takes place after the 2020 census.

Virginia voters broke the Republican map-making monopoly by electing a Democratic governor in 2017. As a result of last month's election, Virginia Republicans relinquished their longstanding majorities in the legislature, with the Democrats getting an assist from a court ruling earlier this year requiring the re-drawing of several key voting districts.

In North Carolina, close on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision in Rucho that North Carolina's gerrymander was not subject to any cognizable limits under the federal constitution, a state court held the Republicans' gerrymander of congressional districts in that state violated the equal voting rights provisions of North Carolina's own constitution. The court ordered the prompt redrawing of illegal districts to ensure lawful elections by 2020.

Similarly, in 2018 Pennsylvania's supreme court invalidated Pennsylvania's congressional gerrymander as violative of that state's constitution. The court ordered the districts re-mapped in time for the 2018 mid-terms. With fairer maps in place, the closely-divided electorate of Pennsylvania promptly replaced a congressional delegation that for a decade skewed heavily-Republican with a delegation as evenly-divided as Pennsylvania voters.

Last year Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment to Michigan's constitution that takes state legislative and congressional redistricting away from the legislature and vests those powers in an independent redistricting commission, in the style of California's system.

Ohio has enacted reforms, though it has not gone as far as Michigan in wresting redistricting power from the legislature entirely. In 2015 and 2018 Ohio voters approved state constitutional amendments that kept redistricting decisions in the hands of the politicians, while attempting to require that power to be exercised in a way that protects minority rights and, in the case of state legislative districting, through a bipartisan redistricting commission.

In the 2018 elections, Wisconsin Democrats won every statewide office, including the governorship. But in the state legislative races, subject to Wisconsin's notoriously extreme gerrymander, the gerrymander did its work. Though the Democrats won 53% of the statewide vote, the Republicans retained a 63-36 legislative super-majority. Freeing Wisconsin voters from that state's partisan gerrymander will depend on the Democrats retaining control of the governor's veto pen in 2020.

Very significant progress is being made against partisan gerrymanders, despite the federal courts stepping out of the fight, with an improving prospect for fairer districting soon and a resulting restoration of the equal right of American voters to select their own political leaders, rather than the other way around. 