Salon: “Unconstitutional gerrymander”: Federal court strikes down Wisconsin’s GOP-drawn redistricting

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“It should be that the Legislature — the number swings back and forth depending on what the voters want,” The Campaign Legal Center’s Ruth Greenwood said. “Whereas at the moment, it doesn’t seem to matter what the voters want. We just continually get around 60 members of the state Legislature being Republicans.”

Monday’s decision can be, and likely will be appealed to the Supreme Court, which has been reluctant to hear redistricting cases in the past. If Democrats win, it should give the state Legislature enough time to redraw the map with more competitive boundaries ahead of the 2018 election cycle.

“With this decision, partisan gerrymandering should come to an end in Wisconsin and is now on its way to extinction across the nation,” Gerry Hebert, director of the Campaign Legal Center, said on Monday. “And with the implementation of the test we proposed and the court accepted, there will be, for the first time, a standard to identify this harmful practice.”

The ruling also comes as outgoing President Obama has made clear that he plans to focus his immediate post-presidency on the ambitious goal of tackling partisan gerrymandering. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has been tapped by the president to coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps across the country.

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