With no explanation, the Kansas Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a state district judge’s ruling that the new state and congressional voting maps violate the state constitution for being overly partisan.
In the ruling, the high court said it would explain its rationale later.
It needn’t bother.
It’s sadly clear the majority believe it’s beyond their power to alter the course of gerrymandered voting maps. With the reversal, voters in the state’s only two Democratic strongholds — Wyandotte County and the city of Lawrence, will, respectively, be divided into two congressional districts or lumped in with all of western Kansas.
In drawing the new maps, Republican legislators specifically targeted the 3rd District’s Sharice Davids, the state’s lone Democrat in Congress. The new map now narrows the chances of anyone but a Republican representing Kansas in Congress.
In February, Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the legislators’ new voting map and asked them for one where “all Kansans have the opportunity to participate in their government and have their voices heard.”
Because Republicans have a supermajority in the Legislature, they ignored the governor’s request and overruled her veto.
IT WAS OUR hope members of the high court would have agreed with District Court Judge Bill Klapper’s decision that the new maps fail to adequately represent Kansas, and specifically those of Wyandotte County and the city of Lawrence.
By arbitrarily bisecting Wyandotte County along Interstate 70, it shifts 46% of the Black population and 33% of the Hispanic population out of the 3rd District and into the 2nd District along with much of southeast Kansas.
In his argument for the new maps, Brant Laue, the Kansas solicitor general, said the Kansas Constitution recognizes only two discrimination-based challenges to political maps: racial bias, and voter disenfranchisement in terms of one person, one vote.
We would argue that splitting Wyandotte County’s voter base in half is none other than racial bias. It’s precisely because these minorities tend to vote Democratic that Republicans are working to stifle their voice.
In Lawrence’s case, being extracted from the greater Douglas County and placed with that of the rural and expansive First District of western Kansas, also works to dismiss voters’ concerns.
Supreme Courts in North Carolina, Maryland, and New York have recently ruled that their legislatures’ new voting maps negate equal representation much as does Kansas’s.
In Maryland and New York, the courts objected to Democrats’ designs saying they discriminated against Republicans. In North Carolina, the high court struck down maps drawn by Republicans saying they were overtly partisan and as such suppress voter participation.
IS WEDNESDAY’s ruling a nail in the coffin for Kansas Democrats?
To be sure, the new voting maps create a significant hurdle.
Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, the state’s leading LGBTQ rights organization, laid the truth bare when he said in a recent interview with the Kansas City Star that the state’s rural areas “don’t have a history of electing anybody of color … [or] have much of a history of electing women.”
