Decision Overturning Ohio’s Political Gerrymandering

I have uploaded the decision of a three-judge district court overturning the political gerrymandering of Congressional districts in Ohio engineered by Republican legislators.

The opinion is 301 pages and, no, I have not read it from beginning to end. However, due to the length of this opinion, the Court provided the reader with a more concise summary which states, in part:

“Partisan gerrymandering” occurs when the dominant party in government draws district lines to entrench itself in power and to disadvantage the disfavored party’s voters. Plaintiffs in this action are individual Democratic voters from each of Ohio’s sixteen congressional districts, two non-partisan pro-democracy organizations, and three Democratic-aligned organizations. They challenge the constitutionality of Ohio’s 2012 redistricting map. Defendants are Ohio officials, and Intervenors are Ohio Republican Congressmen; Defendants and Intervenors both argue that the Plaintiffs’ claims are not properly before this Court and defend the map’s constitutionality on the merits.

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We join the other federal courts that have held partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional and developed substantially similar standards for adjudicating such claims. We are convinced by the evidence that this partisan gerrymander was intentional and effective and that no legitimate justification accounts for its extremity. Performing our analysis district by district, we conclude that the 2012 map dilutes the votes of Democratic voters by packing and cracking them into districts that are so skewed toward one party that the electoral outcome is predetermined. We conclude that the map unconstitutionally burdens associational rights by making it more difficult for voters and certain organizations to advance their aims, be they pro-Democratic or pro-democracy. We conclude that by creating such a map, the State exceeded its powers under Article I of the Constitution. Accordingly, we declare Ohio’s 2012 map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, enjoin its use in the 2020 election, and order the enactment of a constitutionally viable replacement.

This raises a significant question. For me, this might even be characterized as an existential question. I went to law school. I then went to graduate law school. I’ve always believed that there are, roughly speaking, neutral principles of law that I can master. While there are close cases, at some point, one can discern an authoritative answer to legal questions.

There are currently pending two political gerrymandering cases before the Supreme Court: Rucho v. Common Cause, from North Carolina, and Lamone v. Benisek, from Maryland. Assume that the Court holds that courts cannot address claims that political gerrymandering violates the Constitution. That would mean that the various judges in the numerous cases that have all held to contrary have misinterpreted the law. And, of course, their actions were not off-the-cuff. Every case was well-briefed both by the litigants and by numerous amici curiae. The opinions were detailed and scholarly.

At some level, if so many judges with such a mammoth amount of legal resources at their fingertips cannot reach a “correct” conclusion, the concept of law based upon principles comes into question. In other words, I have simply been fooling myself for the last 45 years?