Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. When we left off last week, the Supreme Court faced a simple but important test: After the court’s Republican-appointed majority approved Texas’ congressional map, would it likewise approve California’s?
The court passed the test this week, when it rejected a Republican appeal that sought to halt California’s Democratic-friendly map, which voters passed in response to the Donald Trump-spurred Texas map.
Of course, it was a test of the court’s own making, prompted by its weak gerrymandering jurisprudence in recent years and its December decision to green-light the Texas map while strongly hinting that it would also back California’s. When the court sided with Texas, the most conservative justices defended the move on the grounds that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
So, the court kept its implicit promise. That’s good.
Noting the potential windfall for Democrats in the midterms, The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board said that angry Republicans “can blame Mr. Trump for starting the race to the gerrymander bottom.”
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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