Supreme Court declines to review Kansas racial gerrymandering dispute
Kaelan Deese
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The Supreme Court on Monday declined a request from Kansas constituents to hear their dispute over a state court decision that allowed the use of a Republican-drawn congressional map accused of being racially gerrymandered.
The Supreme Court of Kansas upheld the GOP-drawn map last year after it had been blocked in a lower court for partisan gerrymandering and diluting minority voting power. The map divided Kansas City’s racially diverse Wyandotte County into two congressional districts for the first time in decades.
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The high court’s decision not to take up the case means the redrawn map will remain. The vote count over the decision was not revealed, though the denial means fewer than four justices agreed to take up the petition.
Kansas asked the justices to avoid taking up the case, describing the case as a “creature of state law” and saying that the high court lacked jurisdiction over the matter. The state also said the map was lawful and did not involve intentional discrimination.
“Petitioners’ argument is premised on the theory that this case involves intentional minority vote dilution,” the state wrote. “But it is not plausible that the Kansas Legislature enacted SB 355 with a racially discriminatory purpose. Petitioners’ claims would therefore fail regardless of the answer to the question presented.”
The group of voters, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, and the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in court filings that the maps were in violation of the 14th Amendment, which bars “intentional racial discrimination in redistricting where the minority voters discriminated against are not sufficiently numerous to form a majority of eligible voters in a single-member district.”
“Under this conception of the Fourteenth Amendment, where minority voters are fewer in number or more dispersed, states have carte blanche to intentionally discriminate against them in drawing districts — even if the legislature announced that it acted specifically to disadvantage minority voters,” groups wrote in their initial petition.
The Supreme Court also declined to hear an appeal of Steven Donziger, a disbarred environmental attorney’s challenge to his criminal contempt conviction. He argued his prosecution violated his rights because private attorneys appointed by a federal judge handled the case against him after the Justice Department declined to do so.
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Another case the court declined was a challenge to U.S. steel import tariffs imposed in 2018 under President Donald Trump. The Biden administration has largely maintained the same policies, and at issue in the case was whether the findings of a 2018 Trump administration report that recommended steel tariffs were subject to court scrutiny under federal administrative law.
The justices granted one case, a challenge involving a Maine-based hotel owner’s bid to dodge a lawsuit accusing it of being insufficiently clear on its website about whether the hotel had accessibility features for people with disabilities.