The U.S. Supreme Court on March 27 rejected a challenge to a redrawn congressional map for Kansas.
The Supreme Court did not release a tally of which justices, if any, would have heard the challenge to a ruling from the Kansas Supreme Court. Four justices must approve the type of challenge made, a writ of certiorari, for it to be heard.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other parties brought the challenge in 2022, claiming that the redrawn map was racially discriminatory.
The top court’s rejection is a win for Kansas, which urged the court not to hear the case, arguing it did not involve any federal questions. Even if it did, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled correctly when it overturned a lower court ruling against the map.
The parties did not respond to requests for comment.
The Kansas legislature redrew the congressional map following the 2020 Census. Changes included splitting Wyandotte County, which includes Kansas City, into two districts. Legislators said the changes were made due to the increase in population, while opponents charged racial motivations.
Other Rulings
Kansas District Judge Bill Klapper, in April 2022, ruled that the redrawn map violated voters’ rights.Klapper said legislators “internationally and effectively diluted minority votes” with the new map, violating the Kansas Constitution. He cited in part how Jowei Chen, a political science professor at the University of Michigan and a plaintiff expert, analyzed the map and concluded it was an intentional, partisan gerrymander. The judge also noted the map did not receive support from Democrat lawmakers.
The Kansas Supreme Court overturned Klapper’s ruling.
The record “demonstrates that plaintiffs did not ask the district court to apply the correct applicable legal tests to their race-based claims” and that the lower court, in turn, did not apply the legal tests, the court said. Klapper did not “make the requisite fact-findings to satisfy either legal test applicable to plaintiffs’ race-based equal protection claims.”
Challengers
In their challenge to the Kansas Supreme Court decision, the American Civil Liberties Union and other petitioners asserted that the court’s decision wrongly interpreted state constitutional guarantees of equal protection, which are “coextensive” with the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.“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,” they said. “This intolerable rule would apply across most of the country, given the relatively small number of areas with sufficiently numerous and concentrated minority populations.”
Kobach said the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to review a state matter but that even if it could check it, justices should not reverse the decision.
“As the Kansas Supreme Court explained, a vote dilution claim under Equal Protection Clause requires a showing of both discriminatory intent and discriminatory effect. The Kansas Supreme Court chose to ‘adhere to’ this same standard when applying the equal protection guarantees found in the Kansas Constitution and determined that Petitioners had not satisfied it,” Kobach said. “That decision is correct and—even assuming it raises a Fourteenth Amendment question—fully consistent with this Court’s precedents.”
