Our democracy is on life support due to the partisan gerrymander.

My friend Kirsten quipped that the Trump Administration is the result of “end-stage gerrymandering.” The image invoked is that our democracy is on life support. We need extreme measures to allow it to breathe on its own again.

Here in Utah, we have several groups investigating solutions to gerrymandering. One group is working on a Citizen’s Initiative that would establish an impartial Redistricting Commission. We are about to begin gathering the required signatures to put this measure on the ballot.

Our redistricting legal team is investigating a lawsuit against partisan gerrymandering, similar to the case before the Supreme Court in Whitford v. Gill, Wisconsin.

Similar efforts are happening across the US. Racial gerrymandering took a blow from the Supreme Court this week when the State of Virginia was ordered to reconsider its methodology to eliminate racism from several districts.

Suddenly gerrymandering is a “sexy” issue. Everyone is starting to recognize that fair boundaries are about political power, and power is sexy. The Tea Party’s manifesto to take back power began shortly after the election of President Obama. It was a robust grassroots effort to take back State Legislatures; in most States, it is the Legislature which has the constitutional authority to draw up legislative districts. We have 4 districts in Utah which have been “drawn and quartered” across the Democrat base in Salt Lake County. We have no federal representation in Utah among our 6 representatives. The sad story of how we ended up in a national situation where Republicans control so many State governments is detailed in the book “Rat**ked” by David Daley.

Anti-gerrymandering lawsuits tend to look at whether the gerrymander has violated certain provisions of the Constitution, namely that of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

We Democrats woke up too late to stop the partisan gerrymander, but now we have the energy to fight back. And there is some hope that Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court gave us a roadmap when he stated that partisan gerrymandering “subjects a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment because of their views” and thus violates the First Amendment. The Campaign Legal Center has laid out three principles to be met to prove that partisan gerrymandering occured:

It appears that Whitford v. Gill will meet

these 3 criteria. Justice Kennedy had

signalled in previous decisions that he

was looking for a specified defnition of

partisan gerrymandering which could

be legally applied across any future

such cases, and the Wisconsin case will

be the first heard by the Court since it

indicated a willingness to hear cases

based upon strict criteria. The Campaign Legal

Center is soliciting cases from around the country, although they have also advised waiting until the Wisconsin case is settled. Jurisdictions who file their own cases now may have some hope of relief in 2018 if the Supreme Court should rule that Wisconsin must reverse its gerrymander.

This is a complex issue, which requires that we all become better educated. My hope is that the citizens of any State which has been subject to gerrymandering will foster grassroots movements to demand remedies. In Utah we first started with a Facebook page, and then a group of concerned citizens from several community organizations coalesced together into an alliance. Finally a legal team was established to consider possible court remedies. We are moving to take our democracy off of life support and we hope you will do the same in your communities.