WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court turned away Republican challenges to congressional maps drawn for this year’s election by state courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Over three dissents, the justices left in force a North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that could help Democrats in the November election. The state court said a map drawn by the Republican-controlled General Assembly was so partisan that it violated several provisions of the state Constitution.
The lawmakers’ map would have given the GOP likely wins in at least 10 of the 14 seats in the closely divided state. The court-ordered map is more even, with seven likely Republican districts, five likely Democratic districts and two competitive seats. States must redraw their districts after the U.S. Census.
Republicans were urging the court to adopt a far-reaching legal theory that contends the U.S. Constitution sharply limits state supreme courts in striking down gerrymandered maps and discriminatory voting laws. The approach focuses on the Constitution’s elections clause, which says the rules for congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
The three dissenting justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — suggested they agreed with those arguments. The clause’s language “specifies a particular organ of a state government, and we must take that language seriously,” Alito wrote for the group.
A fourth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, said the court eventually should take up the issue. But Kavanaugh said it was too close to this year’s elections for the Supreme Court to force North Carolina to change its districts again.
The court as a whole did not explain its reasoning.
North Carolina Republicans sought emergency intervention to block the map from being used in the November election, when their party is seeking to seize control of the U.S. House. State officials urged the court to leave the revised map intact, as did voting-rights groups including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.
In the other case, a group of Republican voters said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court improperly drew its own congressional map when the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic governor couldn’t agree on one.
The voters asked the U.S. Supreme Court to order statewide at-large elections for all 17 seats. The voters pointed to a rarely invoked 1941 law that says at-large districts can be used as a last resort if a state fails to create new districts after a decennial census.
In a two-sentence order that came with no noted dissents, the court said the losing side would be able to appeal once a three-judge panel that will consider the case has ruled.
