On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the legislature must draw new maps for the state after the old ones were found to violate the law. The decision wasn’t necessarily a surprise given recent Republican losses have left the court dominated by liberals, but what exactly does it mean for 2024?
That’s up for debate, but it didn’t take the mainstream press long to take a victory lap. The New York Times described the old maps as “heavily gerrymandered,” a phrase that never gets applied to the laughable maps in places like Maryland, Illinois, and California.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court said on Friday that the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislative maps that favor Republicans are unconstitutional. It ordered new maps before the 2024 election in a ruling that could produce a seismic political shift in a crucial presidential swing state.
Justice Jill J. Karofsky, writing for the majority, said that Wisconsin’s current maps violate a requirement in the State Constitution “that Wisconsin’s state legislative districts must be composed of physically adjoining territory.”
“Given the language in the Constitution, the question before us is straightforward,” she wrote. “When legislative districts are composed of separate, detached parts, do they consist of ‘contiguous territory’? We conclude that they do not.”
The summary is that the new Democrat majority on the court decided to abuse a statute in order to come up with a tortured reason to throw out the old map for purely partisan reasons. In this case, the petitioners who challenged the old map claimed the fact that some districts encompassed mainland parts of the state and islands, they were not technically “adjoining territory.”
The number of voters impacted was almost non-existent, and the issue was already litigated a year-and-a-half prior to this latest lawsuit. Democrats knew, though, that if they brought the issue back up, their newly bought and paid-for Supreme Court would do their bidding. Sure enough, that’s what happened.
So, what happens now? The decision will give the GOP-controlled legislature and the Democrat governor a chance to draw new maps. When that inevitably doesn’t happen because neither side will agree, the court will then redraw the maps. You can take one guess how they’ll turn out.
On the other hand, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has a different take.
Let’s just say I don’t share Walker’s optimism. Would it take extreme gerrymandering to redraw the maps in a way that leads to Democrats holding a majority of the state’s legislative seats? It would, but when has that ever stopped Democrats? In the end, while the matter could end up before the Supreme Court, it’s currently December of 2023. It would not be ruled on before the 2024 election, and by then, the damage will already have been done. We’ll have to see how far Democrats push things, but I wouldn’t count on them compromising.
In the end, this is why winning elections matters. Republicans did little to try to win that key Wisconsin Supreme Court seat back in April, and now Democrats have the power to manipulate the politics of one of the most important swing states in the country. Chalk this up to another disaster for the GOP and its current leadership.
