This is the Ohio congressional district map being used for the 2022 election, with 15 U.S. House seats, down from 16 in the elections from 2012 through 2020.Rich Exner, cleveland.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio — For the second time this year, the Ohio Supreme Court has rejected state Republicans’ official congressional map plan as illegally gerrymandered, citing the new redistricting language added by voters to the state constitution in 2018.
But the ruling, issued Tuesday morning in response to lawsuits from Democrats and voting-rights advocates, will not affect this year’s elections, since the primary election for Ohio’s ongoing congressional races already was held in May, with the general election set for November.
In the ruling, issued by a slim 4-3 majority, the court said Republicans again split the Akron, Cleveland and Cincinnati areas in a way that unnecessarily minimized Democrats’ chances of winning a fair share of the state’s 15 districts.
The map, on paper, favors Republicans to win 10 of Ohio’s 15 congressional districts, although two of the Democratic-leaning districts, one based in Cincinnati and the other in Toledo, project as hotly competitive and can be thought of as toss-up districts. Four Republican-leaning districts project to favor the GOP by around 8 percentage points, making them solidly Republican but potentially competitive in theory.
That compares to the wildly uncompetitive map Ohio has used since through this year, which favors Republicans to win 12 of 16 seats. None of the seats changed hands for the decade the map will be in effect.
In Tuesday’s ruling, Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who’s retiring at the end of the year due to age limits, once again joined the court’s three Democrats voting to reject a GOP-drawn map. Similar to the court’s other rulings on gerrymandering cases from earlier this year this year, the other three Republican justices, Pat DeWine, Sharon Kennedy and Pat Fisher, dissented, accusing the majority of exceeding their legal authority.
The same combination of justices has issued similar rulings six other times this year — five rulings rejecting state legislative maps, and another, in January, rejecting Republicans’ previous congressional map plan.
In their Tuesday ruling, the court said under the state constitution, the Republican-controlled state legislature now has 30 days to draw a new congressional map, which would be used for the 2024 election. If the legislature fails to act, the court said the Republican-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission, a panel of state elected officials, would have another 30 days after that.
It’s unclear what state Republicans are planning to do in response. In the parallel set of redistricting litigation involving state legislative districts, Republicans have taken to ignoring the court’s orders to redraw the maps this year, and have said they will take the issue up again sometime after the November election. In theory, the Supreme Court could have legal authority under the state constitution to draw the district lines themselves, although the concept has not been legally tested.
Spokespeople for House Speaker Bob Cupp, Gov. Mike DeWine and Senate President Matt Huffman said Tuesday they are reviewing the decision.
The legislature isn’t scheduled to meet until November, although might convene before then if Republican lawmakers opt to take up new abortion restrictions in the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the national right to abortion.
In their ruling Tuesday, the court majority flatly rejected an argument from Huffman, who claimed due to technical reasons in how the constitutional language was written, the new map was no longer bound by legal standards barring it from having undue political favoritism or unduly splitting communities.
The court majority said Huffman’s interpretation would allow the majority party to easily circumvent the political rules by first approving a map they knew would be rejected.
“No constitutional language suggests that the voters … intended to allow the prohibitions against partisan favoritism and unduly splitting governmental units to be avoided so easily,” the majority said.
The majority also sided with plaintiff’s experts who said Republicans obviously designed the map to maximize their chances in November while separating similar communities, citing for instance, their choice to strategically split Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, to create a slightly Democratic district and a heavily Republican one.
They said the map packs “Democratic voters into a few dense Democratic-leaning districts, thereby increasing the Republican vote share of the remaining districts. As a result, districts that would otherwise be strongly Democratic-leaning are now competitive or Republican-leaning districts.”
In a dissenting opinion, Kennedy and Justice DeWine, whose father is the governor who serves on the redistricting commission, said they accepted Republican arguments that they chose to focus on creating competitive congressional districts rather than proportionality, which refers to shooting for each party to win a number of seats in line with their statewide vote share.
Unlike new state legislative redistricting rules, which contain proportionality language, there’s no such language in Ohio’s congressional redistricting rules.
“The majority clearly has a number of Democrat congressional seats in mind, and any plan that does not result in that number will be deemed unconstitutional and therefore invalid,” Kennedy and DeWine said.
Fisher, DeWine and Kennedy all faulted the majority for setting a case schedule they said was needlessly fast, since they said the maps won’t be resolved until the 2024 elections anyway. The schedule didn’t allow for parties in the case to fully vet their arguments, including holding depositions.
“This court’s failure to hold even one hearing in these cases undoubtedly raises concerns among the public regarding this court’s lack of transparency, and one might wonder why such concerns have not been voiced in the media,” Fisher wrote in his own separate dissent.
Two sets of groups filed the lawsuits that led to Tuesday’s ruling. One was from the Ohio chapters of the ACLU and the League of Women Voters, while the other was from a local affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group founded by former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder that’s waged legal challenges to new Republican-drawn maps in states across the country.
The groups praised the ruling as a victory for voters. Jen Miller, president of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, called on the legislature to approve a new map as soon as possible, well in advance of the 2024 election.
“It’s high time for the Ohio General Assembly and the Ohio Redistricting Commission to respect the Ohio constitution and the Supreme Court,” Miller said.
“With today’s ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court is standing up for Ohio voters by striking down an unconstitutional congressional map designed to give Republicans an unfair advantage,” Abha Khanna, a lawyer for the Democratic redistricting group, said in a statement. “With today’s ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court is standing up for Ohio voters by striking down an unconstitutional congressional map designed to give Republicans an unfair advantage. Ohioans made their voice heard, and they deserve to vote in fairly drawn districts.”
The Republican-dominated Ohio Redistricting Commission approved the map. The Republican members are DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, state Auditor Keith Faber, and the Republican state legislative leaders, Cupp and Huffman, although both appointed lieutenants to sit in their place on the commission later in the process. The commission’s two Democrats are House Minority Leader Allison Russo and state Sen. Vernon Sykes.
Ohio voters added the new redistricting language the court cited on Tuesday to the state constitution in 2018 as an anti-gerrymandering reform. In a compromise with Democrats, Republicans agreed to back the reform to create what they said would be more competitive and fairer districts with, thanks to how the rules were designed, greater incentives for bipartisan cooperation and transparency. The new rules say that maps passed without bipartisan support must meet a legal standard to not “unduly” benefit a political party or its incumbents.
A similar process saw new redistricting rules for state legislative districts added to the state constitution in 2015.
But the redistricting process hasn’t played out as designed. Republicans, particularly Cupp and Huffman, have tightly controlled the process, often introducing maps at the last minute with little opportunity for input from Democrats. Republicans meanwhile have accused the court of overreaching in its decisions and eventually threatened to impeach O’Connor, who’s retiring at the end of the year due to judicial age limits, for ruling against them.
The Tuesday ruling is the second to reject a Republican-drawn congressional map. The court rejected a previous Republican-drawn plan in January. But a second map, approved by Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission in March, ended up being used anyway for Ohio’s first primary election in May for what amount to technical legal reasons.
Tut the parallel legal process challenging the new state legislative maps resulted in Ohio House and Senate races being pulled from the May election. But a federal court ordered one of the maps rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court as illegal to be used in a second primary election on Aug. 2. The federal court, in an opinion written by two appointees of ex-President Donald Trump, said using the rejected map was the only way to settle what the court viewed as a political standoff between the court and the redistricting commission.
Amid the ongoing state legislative election, the state Supreme Court in May gave the redistricting commission until early June to draw new state legislative maps that would be used for the 2024 elections.
But state Republicans ignored the order, contending that without the pending deadline of an imminent election, the court lacks the legal power to order them to draw maps by a particular date.
Here is the ruling:
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