12
RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE
Opinion of the Court
the Court extended its ruling to malapportionment of
congressional districts, holding that Article I, §2, required
that “one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be
worth as much as another’s.” 376 U. S., at 8.
Another line of challenges to districting plans has focused on race. Laws that explicitly discriminate on the
basis of race, as well as those that are race neutral on
their face but are unexplainable on grounds other than
race, are of course presumptively invalid. The Court
applied those principles to electoral boundaries in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, concluding that a challenge to an “uncouth twenty-eight sided” municipal boundary line that
excluded black voters from city elections stated a constitutional claim. 364 U. S. 339, 340 (1960). In Wright v.
Rockefeller, 376 U. S. 52 (1964), the Court extended the
reasoning of Gomillion to congressional districting. See
Shaw I, 509 U. S., at 645.
Partisan gerrymandering claims have proved far more
difficult to adjudicate. The basic reason is that, while it is
illegal for a jurisdiction to depart from the one-person,
one-vote rule, or to engage in racial discrimination in
districting, “a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional
political gerrymandering.” Hunt v. Cromartie, 526 U. S.
541, 551 (1999) (citing Bush v. Vera, 517 U. S. 952, 968
(1996); Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 905 (1996) (Shaw II );
Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 916 (1995); Shaw I, 509
U. S., at 646). See also Gaffney v. Cummings, 412 U. S.
735, 753 (1973) (recognizing that “[p]olitics and political
considerations are inseparable from districting and
apportionment”).
To hold that legislators cannot take partisan interests
into account when drawing district lines would essentially
countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting
to political entities. The “central problem” is not determining whether a jurisdiction has engaged in partisan
gerrymandering. It is “determining when political gerry-