Patrick Marley

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Democrats renewed their gerrymandering fight Friday with a pair of lawsuits over election maps that have helped Republicans maintain big margins in the state Assembly.

An expanded group of Democratic voters filed a new version of their long-running lawsuit on Friday, three months after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring an earlier version of their suit.

Just hours later, the campaign operation for the Democratic members of the Assembly filed a separate suit. The group asked to consolidate its case with the other one.

The new filings, submitted to a three-judge court in Madison, were aimed at addressing legal flaws identified by the high court and giving the Democrats a chance to challenge the maps for all 99 of the state's Assembly seats.

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The cases likely will be considered for months and are not expected to have any effect on the Nov. 6 election. But if the lawsuits go Democrats' way, they could result in changes for the 2020 election.

The legal fight is all but certain to eventually return to the Supreme Court at a time when the Senate is considering confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy was a conservative who was open to legal arguments that election lines could violate voters' constitutional rights if politicians went too far in drawing the lines for partisan gain. Legal observers have contended Kavanaugh would be harder to persuade with such arguments.

The high court has never thrown out election maps for partisan reasons. The suit in Wisconsin, as well as ones from other states, have asked the justices to rule that politicians have unconstitutionally cramped voting rights by drawing districts to greatly favor themselves.

Every 10 years, Wisconsin lawmakers must draw new congressional and legislative districts to account for population changes. Republicans controlled all of state government in 2011 and put in place lines that helped them.

Republicans now control the Assembly 64-35 and the Senate 18-15. The November elections will determine the makeup of the Legislature for the next two years.

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While the Supreme Court ruled in June that Democratic voters didn't have legal standing for the earlier version of their lawsuit, it found there may be a way to establish standing and continue the case. It kicked the case back to the three-judge panel for further proceedings.

The earlier lawsuit included 12 Democratic voters, but the Supreme Court found those voters couldn't challenge districts they didn't live in. The new suit has 40 plaintiffs, giving them the ability to challenge far more of the Assembly's 99 districts.

They argued that Democrats have been packed into so few districts and their voting power so diluted as to violate their Fourteenth Amendment guarantee to equal protection under the law.

In addition, they contended their First Amendment right to free association has been violated because the maps make it much more difficult to register and turn out voters, recruit volunteers and court donors.

In the second lawsuit, the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee made similar arguments, saying they could not find candidates in 29 races in 2014, which marked their worst recruiting performance since at least 1972.

"As a direct result of the (maps') deliberate, severe, persistent and unwarranted pro-Republican skew, the Assembly Democrats have been impaired in the performance of virtually all of their associational functions," attorney Lester Pines wrote.

In the filing for Democratic voters, attorney Douglas Poland called the way the maps were drawn in 2011 "one of the worst partisan gerrymanders in modern American history."

"This kind of partisan gerrymandering is both unconstitutional and profoundly undemocratic," he wrote.

Amy Hasenberg, a spokeswoman for GOP Gov. Scott Walker, said she expected the courts to reject the Democratic challenges.

"We remain confident our maps will continue to be upheld as they were earlier this year when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the state of Wisconsin," she said in a statement.

The Democratic voters are asking to block the maps for the 2020 election and put in place ones that are more neutral. The Legislature is slated to draw new maps in 2021, after the 2020 U.S. Census.

The panel that will consider the lawsuit brought by voters consists of U.S. District Judge James Peterson of Wisconsin's western district, U.S. District Judge William Griesbach of Wisconsin’s eastern district, and Kenneth Ripple, a senior judge with the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Peterson was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, Griesbach by Republican President George W. Bush and Ripple by Republican President Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Assembly members are asking for the cases to be combined and heard by the same panel. If the case is considered separately, it could be heard by a different group of judges.