In the 2016 election, President Trump won several key states that nobody thought he would win, two of those states are Ohio and Michigan. Trump won the coveted state of Ohio by over 446K votes. In the blue state of Michigan, where a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since Ronald Reagan, Trump by just over 10K votes.
It wasn’t just the presidential election results that stunned the Democrat Party, Democrats also found themselves in the minority in both the House and the Senate. In 2018, they came back to win a majority in the House, but couldn’t take control of the Senate. Democrats know that going into 2020 with a wildly successful economy and a very popular President running for reelection, that they might not have a chance of holding onto their majority in the House.
Democrats, in Michigan and Ohio, who were pinning their hopes on winning lawsuits that would change the way district maps in states look prior to the 2020 election, just got some bad news today.
LA Times – The Supreme Court agreed Friday to put on hold partisan gerrymandering cases from Ohio and Michigan, temporarily sparing Republican lawmakers in those states of the need to redraw congressional districts by the summer.
The high court’s emergency order came as no surprise. The justices are weighing partisan gerrymandering cases from North Carolina and Maryland, and are expected to hand down rulings by the end of June. At issue is whether state lawmakers violate the Constitution if they drew an electoral map to entrench their party in power.
Federal judges in Ohio and Michigan had ordered the two states to begin immediate work on redrawing their electoral maps, but the Supreme Court suspended those rulings in a pair of brief orders. There were no dissents from the justices.
The Washington Examiner reports- 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.
