Last week’s Illinois Supreme Court decision dismissing a Republican challenge to the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps prompted two common public reactions.
Few who paid attention were taken aback when five Democratic justices on the seven-member court — Mary Jane Theis, P. Scott Neville, Joy Cunningham, Mary K. O’Brien and Jane Rochford — rode to the rescue of their fellow party members’ supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate.
The lawsuit was perceived from Day 1 as a challenge to the court’s professed fidelity to the rule of law as opposed to protecting legislative Democrats.
“Illinois’ Supreme Court justices failed that most basic test,” the Chicago Tribune charged.
How so?
The “Supreme Court Five” didn’t rule so much as they ducked.
They ruled that the GOP lawsuit filed earlier this year is unworthy of a hearing on the merits because the challenge to the 2021 legislative maps was filed too late.
This pretext stands in contrast to a past pretext to a similar challenge that was dismissed on the grounds that it was filed too close to an election.
Too late to hear.
Too soon to hear.
Take your choice of the best “Catch-22” argument of the day.
Still, it’s a position that’s impossible to defeat because the high court is infallible because it’s final.
The good news for the high court’s reputation is that few will take note of its decision. Even fewer will care.
Legislative redistricting — the manipulation of Senate and House boundary lines to give the map-drawing party a solid advantage — isn’t on most people’s radars. Redistricting legislative maps every 10 years to adjust for population shifts and increases is crucial to the legislative process but way inside baseball.
Gerrymandering, a process embraced by both parties across the 50 states, allows majority-party legislators to draw their districts in anti-democratic ways that virtually guarantee one election win after another.
So what’s next in what has been a relentlessly futile effort by reformers to bring a fair map-drawing process to Illinois?
Is there another petition drive in the offing, one that would put a state “fair maps” constitutional amendment on the ballot?
That would take time, money and huge effort, perhaps to no avail.
The high court refused in 2016 to allow a proposed amendment on the ballot.
What would be different next time from last time in a state where politics almost always trumps policy?
The bottom line, of course, is that Republicans can’t abandon their effort to force Democratic map-drawers to produce legislative maps that are “compact” and “contiguous,” as the Illinois Constitution requires and the Supreme Court ignores.
Jim Nowlan, a state department head under past Republican governors and a retired University of Illinois government professor, opines that “if something isn’t done,” Republicans will be “dead in the water at least until 2041.”
That kind of talk is music to the ears of ruling partisan Democrats.
After all, to the victor go the spoils, and there are lot of spoils to go around with the state’s $50 billion-plus annual budget.
One-party rule also spoils state government, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to those who control the levers of power.
