ASHINGTON,
June 30 - In a judgment that could eventually affect the composition of
legislative districts in many states, including New York, the Supreme Court
on Wednesday upheld a lower-court redistricting plan for the Georgia
legislature that benefited Republicans.
The judgment seemed to upset a decades-old understanding that election
districts were automatically safe from challenge under the court's
one-person, one-vote doctrine if the largest district was no more than 10
percent larger than the smallest.
The action, on the day after the court ended its official session, was
called a summary affirmance; the justices' rationale could not be evaluated,
since they issued no controlling majority opinion. The vote was 8 to 1, with
Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting.
Earlier this year, ruling on different grounds, the court supported the
boundaries of Congressional districts in Pennsylvania against Democratic
accusations of political gerrymandering and refused to hear a Colorado case
in which a state court invalidated an unusual second redistricting plan that
favored Republicans.
The most conspicuous redistricting case on appeal to the court is from
Texas and may not be acted on before the November election. A new map of
Congressional districts was approved there last year at the urging of
Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. Republicans drew the
new lines after they won full control of the legislature, and those lines
are expected to bring the party at least four new House seats in November.
Tim Storey, a redistricting expert at the National Conference of State
Legislatures, said that the legislatures in at least a half-dozen states
would now be prone to legal challenge because of the Georgia case and that
all states would have to take the case into account when legislative
boundaries were drawn after the 2010 census.
In several decisions over the last three decades, the Supreme Court
seemed to hold that state and local governments were in compliance with the
one-person, one-vote doctrine as long as no election district was 5 percent
larger or smaller than the norm. That meant the largest district could be 10
percent larger than the smallest one.
The reasoning was that sometimes districts had to be of somewhat
different size to take account of city and county lines and other community
interests.
In 2001, the Democrats who controlled the Georgia legislature drew maps
for the state's House and Senate in an openly political way. The most
possible seats were placed in inner-city Atlanta and rural areas, where the
population is mostly Democratic, and the fewest possible were in suburban
areas that are predominantly Republican. The district with the most people
was 9.9 percent larger than the one with the fewest.
A group of Republicans sued on the ground that the maps violated the
one-person, one-vote doctrine. A three-judge federal panel upheld their
claim on the ground that the gerrymandering was purely political. That court
then produced a legislative map that was more favorable to Republicans.
The Supreme Court affirmed the outcome of the lower court's ruling
although, given the absence of a governing opinion, not necessarily the
reasoning.
"The only thing that is clear is that the court has taken away what many
people believed was a safe harbor of 10 percent," said Richard L. Hasen, an
election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Professor Hasen suggested that the court might believe that a 10 percent
variation was legitimate in some circumstances but not when the only
justification was political gerrymandering, but he said this was just
speculation.
Two justices who in the past have held that partisan gerrymandering is
unconstitutional, John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer, signed a
concurring opinion on Wednesday saying the plan drawn by the Georgia
legislature did not meet constitutional standards.
Justice Scalia dissented on the ground that redistricting was entirely a
legislative matter and not in the purview of the courts.
In New York, Republicans, drawing the lines for State Senate districts in
2002, managed to add an additional seat upstate by putting fewer people in
districts there and more in New York City districts. This is one of several
grounds on which Democrats are challenging that redistricting.
The New York case will be before the Supreme Court in the term that
begins in October.