New W.Va. map being drawn (UPDATED)
on Jan 17, 2012 at 2:35 pm
UPDATED Wednesday 1:05 p.m. State officials have now filed their reply brief. It can be found here. The case is thus now ready for action either by the Chief Justice or by the full Court.
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Challengers to the West Virginia legislature’s new election map for the state’s three congressional districts argued on Tuesday that the legislature is already working on a new redistricting plan, so they contended that there is no need for the Supreme Court to get involved now on an emergency basis. In a response filed this afternoon, the Jefferson County Commission and two of its members argued that the legislature is capable of acting quickly to replace the plan struck down earlier this month by a three-judge U.S. District Court. A post yesterday described this new redistricting dispute (Tennant, et al., v. Jefferson County Commission, application 11A674).
The state legislature was not in session when the redistricting map was nullified in court, the challengers noted, but it has now begun work, and already 13 of the 34 members of the state senate have joined in sponsoring a new plan “that meets all federal and state constitutional requirements.” The sponsors, it argued, come from all parts of the state, and even include the state senator who is married to one of the officials seeking a Supreme Court delay of the District Court ruling — Secretary of State Natalie Tennant. Moreover, the response said, Secretary Tennant has said on her official website that she now accepts that the legislature did not adopt a constitutional map.
The new bill now under review in the legislature — “SB 199” — cures one of the redistricting worries that the state legislature had in mind: it does not put the state’s two incumbent Republican members of the House into the same district to compete against each other. It does cross two county lines, the response conceded, but that illustrates that the state does not routinely seek to avoid keeping counties intact within a single district.
On the state officials’ complaint that the District Court was wrong in demanding that officials demonstrate that each one of their redistricting goals was necessary to justify a deviation from absolute equality of population among the three districts, the challengers said that members of the legislature made no attempt when the plan was under consideration there to provide any justification for deviating from zero variance. All of the defenses of the 0.79 percent deviation from equality, the challenges contended, has come after the fact, during the court case, so should not now be allowed as justification.
If it should turn out that the legislature cannot come up with a new map in time for elections this year, the challengers said, elections can go forward in the districts used in the last election, and then adjustments can be made if the Supreme Court were later to overturn the District Court decision against the legislature’s plan. As another alternative, the filing said, the legislature could postpone the deadlines that candidates have for filing to run for the House seats.
