The Supreme Court on Friday halted two lower-court rulings that struck down congressional maps in Ohio and Michigan as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders and ordered the drawing of new congressional maps before the 2020 elections.
Republican lawmakers in both states asked the high court to put their respective lower-court rulings on hold. The Supreme Court granted those requests, with no noted dissents.
The maps in Michigan and Ohio had been struck down by two different federal courts as partisan gerrymanders that violated the Constitution. The federal court in Ohio invalidated the state’s congressional map, under which Republicans held 12 of the state’s 16 congressional seats, in a ruling this month. The court in Michigan, meanwhile, ruled last month the state’s redistricting plan crafted by the GOP-controlled legislature was an “extremely grave” violation of the Constitution.
The order from the high court comes as the justices are considering two cases that test the limits of partisanship in the redistricting process.
The court heard oral arguments in those disputes — one out of Maryland and one out of North Carolina — in March and are expected to issue their rulings by the end of June.
In Maryland, Republican voters challenged the lines of the state’s 6th Congressional District drawn by Democratic state lawmakers. In North Carolina, Democratic voters challenged the full congressional voting map drawn by the state’s Republican leaders.
The partisan gerrymandering cases are coming to the Supreme Court ahead of the next redistricting cycle in 2021. The justices are tasked with determining whether extreme partisan gerrymandering, in which voting lines are drawn to entrench the political party in power, rules afoul of the Constitution.
While the Supreme Court has struck down voting maps because of racial gerrymandering, it has never invalidated voting lines on the grounds that an excessive injection of politics in redistricting crossed a constitutional line.
