WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court opted on Friday to take up a Maryland case as part of the court’s attempt to answer the question whether redrawing districts to give an advantage to one party over the other is unconstitutional.
The practice of partisan redistricting is sometimes referred to as “gerrymandering.”
In Maryland’s case, Republican plaintiffs complained that the 6th Congressional District was redrawn after the 2010 census in a deliberate attempt to generate victories for Democrats. The seat had been held by incumbent Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who served nine terms. After the district was redrawn, Bartlett lost to Democratic challenger John Delaney, who holds the seat now.
Josh Kurtz, editor of Maryland Matters, a website that covers Maryland government and politics, said the news that the Supreme Court would take up the Maryland case was a surprise, because the court had already selected a case that addresses the issue of gerrymandering.
“There was another redistricting case involving Wisconsin that everyone thought would supersede the Maryland case,” Kurtz said.
The 6th District stretches from Potomac through western Montgomery County and extends to the very edge of Western Maryland in Garrett County.
Kurtz says some states have non-partisan redistricting commissions, “but in a lot of states, it’s a very partisan process. The partisanship itself is never the issue in these cases; it’s whether people’s rights have been denied, and that’s what the Republicans have been arguing here.”
It is not the only district that’s been the subject of charges of partisan gerrymandering. In a case dating back to 2011, after the last redrawing of Maryland district lines, a member of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, described the outline of the 3rd Congressional District as looking like “a broken-winged pterodactyl, lying prostrate across the center of the state.”
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the redistricting in that case.
