The Colorado Republican Party won a pyrrhic legal victory Tuesday in its unaccountable fight to reinstate its infamous 2003 “Midnight Gerrymander” of congressional seats.
Colorado gained a seventh seat after the 2000 census, but the 2002 legislature – where Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans the House – came to an impasse in drawing new district lines. Thus, a state judge drew boundaries for the 2002 election favoring Republican incumbents Joel Hefley, Tom Tancredo, Bob Schaffer and Scott McInnis as well as Democrats Mark Udall and Diana DeGette. The new 7th CD was almost exactly balanced – a closeness reflected in Bob Beauprez’s 121-vote win that fall.
Republicans thus entered 2003 with a 5-2 congressional edge, but worried that several of their seats might be competitive if the entrenched GOP incumbents stepped down. Since they had regained control of the legislature, Republicans ambushed Democrats in the last three days of the 2003 session with a new redistricting plan designed to lock their advantage into stone. The bitter debates ran until almost midnight.
The state Supreme Court swiftly threw out the gerrymander, citing a 1934 precedent. That should have been the end of it, because there is more than 200 years of legal precedent ruling that state supreme courts are the final arbiters of their own state constitutions. But Republican partisans waded into federal court, where a three-judge federal panel ruled federal courts had no jurisdiction in the case.
That ruling was overturned Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said the lower court was wrong to prevent the lawsuit. That procedural victory doesn’t mean the Republicans have much hope of prevailing on the merits of the case and actually re-instating the gerrymander. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 1993 Growe vs. Emison decision that federal courts must defer to state authority in redistricting cases when a state, through its legislative or judicial branch, has addressed the issue in timely fashion. The unanimous decision was written by Justice Antonin Scalia.
So state Republicans have won the right to go on wasting their time and money – and to again remind Colorado voters of the embarrassing fact that they would much rather jimmy elections in the dark of night at the statehouse than contest them in fairly drawn and competitive districts. That’s a very costly victory indeed.
