Phillip Strach, a North Carolina lawyer representing Ohio's Republican legislative leaders, defends Ohio's new state legislative maps in a Dec. 8, 2021 hearing before the Ohio Supreme Court.
Candidate-filing deadlines for this May’s primary as laid out by the Ohio General Assembly are unforgiving. For state legislative candidates, they’re a mere four weeks from today — on Feb. 2. For congressional candidates, eight weeks away, on March 2.
Those dates provide a stark benchmark for how quickly the Ohio Supreme Court needs to rule on the constitutionality of state legislative and congressional redistricting maps now pending in two separate batches of legal challenges.
The court needs to issue its decisions without further delay.
Oral arguments in lawsuits over the state legislative maps, redrawing 132 General Assembly districts, were heard Dec. 8, nearly a month ago. Regarding the congressional map of 15 new districts (Ohio is losing one congressional district following the 2020 Census), the high court held oral arguments last week, on Dec. 28.
Despite the high stakes, the issues before the court aren’t complicated: Do the maps violate Ohio constitutional provisions overwhelmingly adopted by Ohio voters in two separate referendums, in 2015 and 2018, that sought to outlaw blatantly partisan gerrymandering and the cracking and splitting of votes to that end?
Implicit in those constitutional reforms was a rejection of Ohio’s partisan gerrymanders of 2011 that created the “Snake Along the Lake,” pushing Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s Toledo district over a bridge and into Cleveland, or the “duck district” of U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan that quacked its way up from his Champaign County home in southwest Ohio into towns west of Cleveland, gobbling up ultra-liberal Oberlin.
The 2021 map-drawing is the first test of this new voter-adopted language that explicitly gives the Ohio Supreme Court exclusive jurisdiction in case of challenge.
If the court finds no fault with the redistricting — the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s party-line 5-2 vote redrawing 99 Ohio House districts and 33 Ohio Senate districts, and the Ohio General Assembly’s overwhelming approval of new congressional districts (mostly along party lines although five House Republicans joined Democrats in voting “no”) — well then, case closed.
But such an outcome, while possible, seems unlikely, given the blatantly partisan manipulations of the new maps and arguments in their favor centering on “competitiveness” — a framing that wasn’t part of the constitutional language.
That makes it all the more urgent that — if the high court does feel it must order fixes small or large in all the maps — it do so as soon as possible to give the redistricting commission and General Assembly time to act to fix those mistakes.
As we wrote in a Dec. 1 editorial urging the Supreme Court to rule expeditiously, “those who favor a skewed partisan map [may] try to run out the clock,” to shamelessly give an edge to legislative partisans. “To forestall that,” we wrote then, “any adverse Supreme Court ruling … should include a clear exposition of the court’s expectations about a lawful map and strong punitive warnings that contempt of those admonitions will not be tolerated.”
Two of the five Republicans on the redistricting commission who voted for the redrawn state legislative maps — Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose — did so while making comments that made it appear they voted for the maps holding their noses in distaste. Were they counting on the state Supreme Court to bail them out?
Despite the Ohio Supreme Court’s 4-3 Republican majority (and that GOP Justice Pat DeWine, the governor’s son, has refused to recuse from the cases despite his obvious conflict of interest), Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Summit County Republican, is widely seen as a less partisan arbiter in these cases.
As to the congressional map, independent analysts believe it will award 12 and maybe 13 of the state’s 15 congressional districts to Republicans, tilting it more toward the GOP than the current map (12 of 16 districts).
Standing as Exhibit A in lawsuits challenging the congressional map is the Republican-dominated legislature’s decision to carve up increasingly Democratic Cincinnati’s home county of Hamilton County into three separate GOP-leaning congressional districts. That will further limit the ability of the city’s Democratic voters and of Hamilton County’s Black voters to exercise influence over their congressional representation. The Hamilton County gerrymander has become emblematic of allegations that the map, there and elsewhere in Ohio, is an abuse both of the voters’ will and of the constitutional specifics voters approved.
Challenges to all three maps — the two state legislative maps and the congressional map — are before the Ohio Supreme Court and ripe for decisions. The court must issue those rulings as soon as possible, for the good of the state, and of the integrity of the process.
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