AIRC Update: Petition for Review set for SCOTUS Conference

One of the three cases filed by Arizona Tea-Publicans against the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC), Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (Docket No. 13-1314) has been distributed for the conference of U.S. Supreme Court Justices on September 29.

The Court can and should deny the petition for review by the Arizona State Legislature, upholding the District Court for Arizona opinion which was correctly decided under binding court precedents.

The Court could also relist the petition for review at a later date, something which occurs with regularity.

Howard Fischer today in Arizona redistricting fight goes to Supreme Court, suggests the Court could “summarily overturn” the District Court with an order after its conference. Not likely. This typically would involve an order of remand with instructions from the Court to the District Court for further proceedings. There is not going to be a simple order ruling in favor of the Arizona Legislature.

The Court could grant hearing the petition for review, which I would consider a red flag that the conservative activist justices are once again planning to reverse the Court’s long-standing precedents in their continuing assault upon voting rights.

The Court already has on the docket of its 2014 Term two redistricting cases from the state of Alabama, Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama and Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, challenging the state’s redistricting plan on the grounds of racial gerrymandering.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.com briefly discussed the cases in New ruling due on racial gerrymandering:

The Supreme Court, returning to the long-running issue of the use of race in drawing up new election districts for members of state legislatures, agreed on Monday to weigh the legality of “packing” minority voters into districts where they already are in political control, reducing their chance of having influence elsewhere.

The Court accepted for review two appeals from Alabama, both challenging decisions by a federal district court that upheld (by a split two-to-one vote) a new boundary map that kept the  same number of state senate and state house districts that previously had majorities of African-American voters, but added to those majorities in almost every district.  Sponsors of the plan insisted they were doing so to obey their obligations to protect minority voters’ political strength under federal voting rights law, but the challengers argued that this was an unconstitutional use of racial gerrymandering.

Although the appeals in Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama and Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama each raised two questions, the Court in accepting them for review at its next Term said it would rule only on one issue in each — essentially, the same question about the legality of racial “packing” into minority-dominated districts.

The new case goes back to maps that were drawn up by a state court after the 1990 federal Census, when the legislature could not agreed on new redistricting plans.  Those maps included twenty-seven house districts and eight senate districts that each had African-American majorities, and thus were able to elect candidates of their choice.

After the 2000 Census, the legislature passed new plans, which maintained those twenty-seven house and eight senate districts with minorities in the majority.  The same numbers were preserved in maps drawn after the 2010 Census but, this time, the legislature chose to include the minority population of those districts so that they would contain minority dominance by “super-majorities.”

In other words, the minority population of the house districts reached as high as 76.8% and of senate districts as high as 75.22%.

Challenging those new maps in their Supreme Court appeals, the black and Democratic groups argued that the new redistricting “necessarily increases the political segregation of African Americans and reduces their ability to influence the outcome of legislative district in the rest of the state.”

The appeals were in the form of mandatory appeals, meaning that the Supreme Court essentially had to accept them for review, if it had jurisdiction over them, as it found it did.  The cases will be heard and decided in the next Term, starting in October.

 The redistricting case I recently posted about from the state of Florida, Oh no, Florida again, is a more likely candidate for Supreme Court review. That case, however, is still at the District Court level and is not final.