The justices had already passed up chances to issue sweeping decisions in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland involving claims of partisan gerrymandering. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo Supreme Court sends back N.C. gerrymandering case, mostly rejects Texas map challenge The justices had already passed on chances to issue sweeping redistricting decisions in Maryland and Wisconsin cases.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Texas' congressional districts and said it is declining, for now, to wade into a dispute over a North Carolina redistricting plan that a lower court had found violated the Constitution by overly favoring Republicans.

The move came just a week after the justices passed up chances to issue sweeping decisions in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland involving claims of partisan gerrymandering. Instead, the high court ruled on narrow, technical grounds that steered clear of the central issue, with the plaintiffs hoping to get the justices to rule on when and whether legislative districts become so skewed to favor one party that they violate voters’ constitutional rights.


The Texas case, which split the justices 5-4, was a more traditional redistricting case, over claims that the state's congressional and state House maps violated the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by discrimination against Latino and African-American voters.

With the justices divided along their usual ideological lines, the court's Republican appointees ruled that lower courts went too far in concluding that maps adopted by Texas in 2013 were tainted by discrimination judges found in maps the state drew two years earlier.

The majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito said Texas's legislature became caught in a kind of Catch-22: forced into elections based on maps a court redrew, then told by judges that those maps were still too discriminatory for future elections.

"When all the relevant evidence in the record is taken into account, it is plainly insufficient to prove that the 2013 Legislature acted in bad faith and engaged in intentional discrimination, “Alito wrote. “It was reasonable for the Legislature to think that approving the court-approved plans might at least reduce objections and thus simplify and expedite the conclusion of the litigation.”

Alito's opinion found that only one state legislative seat, House District 90, was racially gerrymandered and must be redrawn. No congressional districts were struck down.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in dissent by her fellow Democratic appointees, said there was no reason to think that the interim maps a court approved in 2012 cured all problems related to discrimination in the maps Texas tried to adopt a year earlier.

"That the 2012 interim maps addressed some of the deficiencies identified by [three Washington-based judges] does not mean that the Legislature in 2013 was free to wholly disregard the significance of other evidence of discrimination that tainted its 2011 maps and were entrenched in the 2012 interim maps," Sotomayor wrote.

The majority opinion and the dissent in the Texas case threw numerous rhetorical elbows, often seeming to test the justices' usual public civility.

Sotomayor's dissent at one point calls Alito's majority opinion "just flat wrong," while Alito contends that "the dissent loses track of its own argument."

Gerrymandering critics used the ruling to call for reforms in how state political maps are drawn, including broader use of independent commissions instead of having state legislatures draw the districts.

"It is time for voters to take up the fight to pass redistricting reform at the state and local level because a narrow Supreme Court majority under Chief Justice John Roberts has failed to protect the voting rights of minority communities,” Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn said in a statement.

But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated it as a rejection of "misguided efforts by unelected federal judges to wrest control of Texas elections from Texas voters."

"The court rightly recognized that the Constitution protects the right of Texans to draw their own legislative districts," Paxton said in his statement.

Neither the Texas ruling nor the court's action on the North Carolina dispute makes much change to the status quo. The vote in the Texas case tracked with the justices' 5-4 decision last September blocking a lower-court ruling requiring Texas to draw new boundaries again.

In January, the justices allowed North Carolina's current congressional map to remain in place for the current election cycle, blocking a lower court’s order forcing a redraw. Two justices, Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented, indicating they would have left in place lower court orders requiring the state to come up with a new map or have the courts draw one.

Monday’s Supreme Court order returned the case to the lower court for further consideration of a legal standing issue raised in the partisan gerrymandering case from Wisconsin that the high court effectively punted on last week.