WASHINGTON (PM) – The Supreme Court decided Thursday that partisan election maps developed by North Carolina Republicans and Maryland Democrats are constitutional regardless of their one-sided appearance.
The 5-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court’s other conservatives stated federal courts cannot intervene to prevent partisan gerrymandering.
“We have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority,” Roberts stated.
Associate Justice Elena Kagan admonished the ruling on behalf of the court’s four liberals. “Of all the times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” she wrote. “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government.”
The ruling decides the way election districts are redrawn once every decade in most states – a system power-handled by political self-interest that has grown more intense each time the Supreme Court refused to corral it.
