Brian Dickerson

Detroit Free Press

Four times since the last U.S. Census, Michigan Republicans have rigged statewide elections in favor of their parties' congressional and legislative candidates.

The impact has been profound: Even when Democratic candidates get more votes, Republicans get more seats.

Now the GOP operatives who systematically diluted Democrats' votes in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 are poised to do it again in 2020 — and on Thursday, the highest court in the land promised to look the other way while they do.

That's the practical consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in lawsuits challenging political boundaries in Maryland, where a Democratic state government drew boundaries that discriminate against Republican voters, and North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers adopted a political map designed to marginalize Democrats.

Besides voiding remedial orders issued by lower courts in both those states, the court's 5-4 decision dooms pending gerrymandering challenges in the more closely divided swing states of Michigan and Ohio, where plaintiffs had persuaded lower courts to reject political maps drawn to amplify the electoral clout of Republican voters.

More:Lower courts implore justices: Stop rigged elections | Brian Dickerson

More:Author: What partisan gerrymandering has cost Michigan

In a dissent joined by three of her colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan succinctly described the tragic consequences of the majority's reluctance to prohibit what even the five conservative justices acknowledged was an affront to fair elections.

"In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals' rights — in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this nation's laws and values no one defends — the majority declines to provide any remedy," Kagan wrote. "For the first time in this nation's history, the majority declares it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because . . . it cannot find a workable legal standard to apply."

The end of "one man, one vote"

The principle that no voter's ballot should count more or less than their neighbor's, summarized succinctly in a long line of Supreme Court cases as "one man, one vote" —is foundational to our democracy. It's the reason every congressional and legislative district in Michigan has roughly the same number of residents, and explains why Michigan and other northeastern states have been losing congressional seats to faster growing states like California, Florida and Texas.

Conservative and liberal justices have long agreed that gerrymandering — the centuries-old practice of manipulating political boundaries to one party's advantage — is a threat to that principle. The Supreme Court's newest member, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, articulated that anxiety when the court heard oral arguments in the Maryland and North Carolina gerrymandering cases earlier this year: "Partisan gerrymandering is a real problem for our democracy,"

But Thursday, in perhaps the most important case of the high court's current term, Kavanaugh sided with four other Republican-appointed justices in concluding gerrymandering is a problem the courts can do nothing to contain.

Confronted with smoking-gun evidence that the majority parties that controlled the redistricting processes in Maryland and North Carolina had deliberately conspired to pack and crack the opposing party's voters into districts that diluted their electoral clout, five Supreme Court justices decided that curbing gerrymandering abuses was a job for the state and federal legislative branches.

The majority's transparently fatuous argument overlooks the fact that it is the constitutional legitimacy of those branches that unchecked partisan gerrymandering has undermined.

A new kind of manipulation

It's indisputable that historically, both parties have drawn political boundaries to favor their own candidates and put their opponent's at a disadvantage. By adopting maps that lasso the vast majority of the other party's voters into a few lopsided districts and fragment the remainder as much as possible, Republicans and Democrats alike have exploited temporary control of state legislatures (which control the redistricting process in all but a few states) to tilt the playing field.

But advances in mapping software and data-gathering have transformed gerrymandering from a crude political bet to a precise science. After the 2010 Census, Republicans who won control of a majority of state legislatures the same year exploited those advances to simulate the impact of thousands of possible redistricting schemes in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The new maps each state adopted have allowed the GOP to maintain decisive legislative and congressional majorities even in election cycles in which Democratic candidates got more votes.

Separate three-judge panels in federal district courts independently concluded that the dominant party has rigged the last four election cycles in four states. The lower court decisions throwing out unconstitutional political maps in North Carolina and Maryland were before the court yesterday; similar rulings invalidating the existing boundaries in Michigan and Ohio are still awaiting the high court's scrutiny, but Thursday's ruling effectively doom plaintiffs hopes of upholding them.

In Michigan, a unanimous three-judge panel earlier this year ordered the Legislature to draw new, less discriminatory boundaries by this summer and to hold a special do-over of Michigan's tainted state Senate elections in 2020.

Last November, Michigan voters overwhelmingly adopted Proposal 2, a constitutional initiative that wrests redistricting authority from the Legislature and transfers it to a new, citizen-led commission in time for the next reapportionment in 2021. The change offers at least the hope that Michigan's 2022 midterm election will take place on a more-level playing field.

In the meantime, the electoral fraud artists who designed the state's current legislative and congressional districts have been given free rein to rig at least one more statewide election.

And Michigan voters who naively hoped the nation's highest court would protect their constitutional rights just got another bitter lesson about the fragility of those rights in the America of John Roberts and Donald Trump.

Brian Dickerson is the Free Press' editorial page editor. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.