Vieth v. Jubelirer
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''Vieth v. Jubelirer'', 541 U.S. 267 (2004), was a United States Supreme Court ruling that was significant in the area of partisan
redistricting Redistribution (re-districting in the United States and in the Philippines) is the process by which electoral districts are added, removed, or otherwise changed. Redistribution is a form of boundary delimitation that changes electoral dist ...
and political gerrymandering. The court, in a plurality opinion by Justice
Antonin Scalia Antonin Gregory Scalia (; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectu ...
and joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices
Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was both the first woman nominated and th ...
and Clarence Thomas, with Justice Anthony Kennedy concurring in the judgment, upheld the ruling of the District Court in favor of the appellees that the alleged political gerrymandering was not unconstitutional. Subsequent to the ruling, partisan bias in redistricting increased dramatically in the 2010 redistricting round.


Background

The plaintiff-appellants in this case were Norma Jean, Richard Vieth, and Susan Furey, Democrats registered to vote in the state of Pennsylvania. They contended that the Republican-controlled
Pennsylvania General Assembly The Pennsylvania General Assembly is the legislature of the U.S. commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The legislature convenes in the State Capitol building in Harrisburg. In colonial times (1682–1776), the legislature was known as the Pennsylvania ...
had unconstitutionally gerrymandered the districts for the election of congressional representatives. This, the plaintiffs claimed, denied Democrats full participation in the American political process by violating the one-person one-vote requirement of
Article I of the United States Constitution Article One of the United States Constitution establishes the legislative branch of the federal government, the United States Congress. Under Article One, Congress is a bicameral legislature consisting of the House of Representatives and the Sena ...
, and denied Democrats equal protection of the laws under the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Often considered as one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and ...
. The 2000 census determined that Pennsylvania was entitled to 19 Representatives in the United States Congress (two fewer than the previous delegation) and congressional election districts therefore had to be redrawn consistent with previous Supreme Court rulings. At the time the election districts were being drawn the Republican Party controlled both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature, and the Governor's office. According to the plaintiffs, prominent Republicans in the national party put pressure on the Assembly to redistrict along partisan lines "as a punitive measure against Democrats for having enacted pro-Democratic redistricting plans elsewhere" and to benefit the party in congressional elections in Pennsylvania.


Legal arguments

The Court considered the following three major questions in relation to the appeal: * Can voters affiliated with a political party sue to block implementation of a Congressional redistricting plan by claiming that it was manipulated for purely political reasons? * Does a state violate the
Equal Protection clause The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "''nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal ...
of the 14th Amendment when it disregards neutral redistricting principles (such as trying to avoid splitting municipalities into different Congressional districts) in order to achieve an advantage for one political party? * Does a state exceed its power under Article I of the Constitution when it draws Congressional districts to ensure that a minority party will consistently win a super-majority of the state's Congressional seats?


Plaintiff's argument

Paul M. Smith Paul March Smith (born 1955) is an American Lawyer, attorney who has argued many important cases, most notably ''Lawrence v. Texas'' and has argued 21 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. In January 2017, he joined the facult ...
represented the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court, arguing that the ruling by the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania "effectively overruled '' avis v.Bandemer''", which had found the issue of partisan gerrymandering within the judiciary's remit: five justices were unwilling to determine that partisan gerrymandering claims were nonjusticiable, instead simply not coming to a clear criteria. In contrast, the District Court's ruling in this case require, according to Smith, factual showings of plaintiffs in these cases that are ..impossible," effectively making gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable. He contended that a "shut-out" standard was applied, to the extent that to prove disenfranchisement of voters through gerrymandering, one must prove disenfranchisement to the extent of voter suppression or suppressing campaigns. Application of this standard doesn't allow scrutiny of an electoral map because gerrymandering doesn't require such overt constitutional violations to manipulate vote share. The plaintiff's proposed standard, that one must be able to demonstrate with a congressional map that it would be impossible to get more than half the congressional seats with less than half the votes, came under heavy scrutiny for its supposed inapplicability. The plaintiff also struggled to convince the Court that one could use prior voting records to decide the electoral outcome of a new redistricting scheme. Both Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer wondered how accurately this would be able to predict outcomes in future elections. Scalia stated the following:
Race does not change. You .are the race you are, and you're not going to change it next year. Political party doesn't work that way. How ..do you decide what is the Republican vote? Is it just registered Republicans and is everybody that's registered a Republican now have to stay ..I just don't understand how you run this scheme? You cannot really tell until after the election is done how many Republicans and how many Democrats there are in each district.
Smith justified this by emphasizing that future cases contending electoral maps would leave the burden of proof on the plaintiffs to prove that the districting scheme was unfair. The Court also questioned how districts could be redrawn to be fair even if a court were able to find a standard by which an electoral map could be struck down.


Defense's argument

John P. Krill, Jr. of
K&L Gates K&L Gates LLP is an American multinational corporation law firm based in the United States, with international offices in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Its namesake firms are Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, a Pittsburgh-ba ...
represented
Robert Jubelirer Robert C. Jubelirer (born February 9, 1937, Altoona, Pennsylvania) is a Republican political leader in Pennsylvania. He served as a member of the Pennsylvania State Senate from 1975 to 2006. He served as President pro tempore of the Pennsylva ...
and John Perzel at the Supreme Court. The defense's argument rested on the claim that redistricting "requires inherent political choices to be made hichare inappropriate for the judiciary to make" under the
political question doctrine In United States constitutional law, the political question doctrine holds that a constitutional dispute that requires knowledge of a non-legal character or the use of techniques not suitable for a court or explicitly assigned by the Constitution ...
. This rather extreme position posited that even if the entire legislature came forward and admitted to political gerrymandering, it would not be the place of the judiciary to strike down the redistricting. The crux of this argument is that there is no constitutional requirement to draw districts impartially with regards to political party. Furthermore, the defense took the ruling and successive elections regarding Indiana's contested electoral map in ''Bandemer'' to be instructive. Krill cites that Democrats, who were supposedly heavily gerrymandered against, won 50% of House seats from Indiana, and successively won control the following election. He also challenged the plaintiff's test used in the complaint as broken as it uses 10 years of election data, counting voters who could have died, moved, or otherwise not become involved in future elections. He also contends that the plaintiff's test assumes Democrats are evenly dispersed across the state when they are normally compacted into urban areas instead. J. Bart DeLone from the Pennsylvania's Attorney General's Office represented
Pedro Cortés Pedro A. Cortés (born May 28, 1966) twice served as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (April 2003 - June 2010 & January 2015 - October 2017). He was the first confirmed Latino Cabinet member and the longest serving Secretary of State ...
and Monna Accurti (Commissioner of the Bureau of Commissions, Legislation and Elections) at the Supreme Court. He argued that even if the Court holds political gerrymandering justiciable, a districting scheme could only be found unconstitutional if "the disadvantaged group has been shut out of a political process as a whole." He also contends that Krill's claim that there is nothing wrong with judicial intent to gerrymander an electoral map is correct as districting is inherently political.


Opinion of the Court

The plurality opinion determined that partisan gerrymandering claims were nonjusticiable because there was no discernible and manageable standard for "adjudicating political gerrymandering claims." The court did not explicitly overturn its ruling in ''Davis v. Bandemer''. Justice Anthony Kennedy concurred with the ruling of the court to uphold the District Court's decision maintaining that cases of political gerrymandering were not justiciable. He did not, however, foreclose the possibility that judicially manageable standards for gerrymandering could be developed in future cases before the Court. Justice
John Paul Stevens John Paul Stevens (April 20, 1920 – July 16, 2019) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 to 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the second-oldes ...
, Justice David Souter, and Justice Stephen Breyer each provided dissenting opinions.


See also

* '' Davis v. Bandemer'' (1986) * ''
League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry ''League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry'', 548 U.S. 399 (2006), is a Supreme Court of the United States case in which the Court ruled that only District 23 of the 2003 Texas redistricting violated the Voting Rights Act. The Court refus ...
'' (2006) * '' Gill v. Whitford'' (2018) * ''
Benisek v. Lamone ''Benisek v. Lamone'', 585 U.S. ____ (2018), and ''Lamone v. Benisek'', 588 U.S. ____ (2019), were a pair of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States in a case dealing with the topic of partisan gerrymandering arising from the 2011 Dem ...
'' and ''
Rucho v. Common Cause ''Rucho v. Common Cause'', No. 18-422, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), is a landmark case of the United States Supreme Court concerning partisan gerrymandering. The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principl ...
'' (2019)


References


Further reading

* *


External links

*
Case Brief for Vieth v. Jubelirer at Lawnix.com
{{Pennsylvania United States Constitution Article Three case law United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court United States electoral redistricting case law United States political question doctrine case law 2004 in United States case law Congressional districts of Pennsylvania Gerrymandering in the United States