30
RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE
KAGAN, J., dissenting
And might be reintroduced until the end of time. Because
what all these bills have in common is that they are not
laws. The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in
office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for
legislative reform are slight.
No worries, the majority says; it has another idea. The
majority notes that voters themselves have recently approved ballot initiatives to put power over districting in
the hands of independent commissions or other nonpartisan actors. See ante, at 32. Some Members of the
majority, of course, once thought such initiatives unconstitutional. See Arizona State Legislature, 576 U. S., at ___
(ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1). But put that
aside. Fewer than half the States offer voters an opportunity to put initiatives to direct vote; in all the rest (including North Carolina and Maryland), voters are dependent on legislators to make electoral changes (which for all
the reasons already given, they are unlikely to do). And
even when voters have a mechanism they can work themselves, legislators often fight their efforts tooth and nail.
Look at Missouri. There, the majority touts a voterapproved proposal to turn districting over to a state demographer. See ante, at 32. But before the demographer
had drawn a single line, Members of the state legislature
had introduced a bill to start undoing the change. See Mo.
H. J. Res. 48, 100th Gen. Assembly, 1st Reg. Sess. (2019).
I’d put better odds on that bill’s passage than on all the
congressional proposals the majority cites.
The majority’s most perplexing “solution” is to look to
state courts. Ante, at 30. “[O]ur conclusion,” the majority
states, does not “condemn complaints about districting to
echo into a void”: Just a few years back, “the Supreme
Court of Florida struck down that State’s congressional
districting plan as a violation” of the State Constitution.