Incredible: After Pennsylvania's Supreme Court struck down the GOP's congressional gerrymander earlier this year and replaced it with a fair map, Republicans state senators have now responded by passing a constitutional amendment to gerrymander the court system itself. This amendment is designed to replace the Democratic majority on the high court with a Republican one, even if the GOP wins fewer votes statewide—as was the case with the state’s congressional delegation under the old map.
This development is the latest Republican move to undermine genuine electoral reform in Pennsylvania. Recently, GOP lawmakers grabbed hold of a widely supported proposal to create an independent redistricting commission and turned it on its head with an amendment that would give the legislature full power to determine who would sit on the panel.
This erosion of independence divided reform advocates despite reluctant support from some legislative Democrats, because a deadlock on the panel would return mapmaking power to the legislature. But now that Republicans have added judicial redistricting to the commission's purview, there’s no longer a divide: Reform groups have universally denounced it and all but two Democrats in the state Senate voted against it. (The House has yet to take it up.)
Currently, judges on both the state Supreme Court and its two intermediate appellate courts are elected statewide; Republicans want to replace that system by dividing the state up into districts, which would give them the chance to draw lines that favor themselves.
To justify this departure from current practice, Republicans are offering an almost comical pretext: The 31 judges who currently sit on these three courts hail from only 15 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, so district-based elections would allow for greater representation of … counties. This, of course, is just a thinly veiled way to lie with statistics, because those 15 counties hold 58 percent of the state’s population. It’s as nonsensical as Donald Trump pointing to county-level election results to hide the fact that a majority of Americans live in counties he lost.
More importantly, it should hardly matter how many counties are home to appellate judge, since judges do not “represent” voters (or counties!) the way that legislators do—their job is instead to interpret and uphold the law. And it should go without saying, but judges have no role in the sort of political deal-making that sees legislators seek to promote the economic or cultural interests of their particular districts.
As absurd as these claims might seem, though, they mask a serious issue: the ongoing conservative assault on judicial independence, which has become part of a widespread trend among Republicans in state legislature across the country over the last decade. When lawmakers like those in Pennsylvania refuse to stop gerrymandering, the courts have become the last resort for those fighting for fair elections. Attempts to gerrymander the judicial branch are a direct attempt to undermine efforts at reform, meaning they’re poised to become the next frontier in the GOP's crusade to subvert electoral democracy.
Indeed, Pennsylvania Republicans are far from alone. Their brethren in North Carolina recently passed a bill to gerrymander district-level court elections after judges repeatedly struck down their other electoral maps for discriminating against black voters and Democrats. Even more dangerously, the North Carolina GOP is considering a proposal that would effectively allow the state legislature to select appellate judges as a way to seize back the majority that Democrats hold on the state Supreme Court. And of course, since the districts used to elect the legislature are already so heavily gerrymandered by the GOP, that would give them a huge edge in judicial selection.
Pennsylvania Republicans will probably be able to refer their amendment to the voters in time for the next round of redistricting, since it only takes a simple majority vote this year and then again after the 2018 elections to put it on the ballot. And because they've already gerrymandered their own districts, they're unlikely to lose their majorities this fall, so reformers will likely have to wage a fierce battle at the ballot box if the GOP proceeds with this power grab.
We at Daily Kos Elections have long been opposed to the almost uniquely American institution of judicial elections because politicizing justice undermines its impartial administration. But since these elections aren’t going to be abolished anytime soon, they must at least be conducted in a manner that treats voters equally, regardless of their race or party.