Our nation’s court system is often taken for granted and forgotten until controversial or groundbreaking rulings are issued. But in an era when the president and other politicians ignore laws, or bend them to seek political advantage, the courts remain the last place where decisions are made based on the letter of the law and the U.S. Constitution.
In recent days, federal courts across the country have issued rulings to stop some of the worst attempts to override constitutional protections for minorities, immigrants and women.
Last week, a judicial panel in Michigan ruled that the state’s congressional and legislative district were unconstitutionally gerrymandered by a plan put together by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011. The districts unfairly gave Republicans an advantage and have to be redrawn before the 2020 election, according to the three-judge U.S. Circuit Court panel. Special elections are also needed in several state Senate districts, the judges ruled.
The gerrymandering was so severe, the judges wrote, that Republicans won 64 percent of the state’s congressional seats while never earning more than 50.5 percent of the statewide vote in elections between 2012 and 2016.
The case is likely headed to the Supreme Court, which is considering similar cases. Lower courts threw out gerrymandered redistricting plans in Maryland and North Carolina. Gerrymandering is a bipartisan affair, as the Maryland case involved districts drawn by Democrats to give their party an advantage and the North Carolina case involved Republicans drawing district lines in their favor.
The Supreme Court has been loathe to get involved in such cases, but that trend is likely to end, Thomas Wolf, a lawyer at the Brennan Center and an expert on voting rights, told The Washington Post.
“The lower courts are showing the way — that courts can make sense of these problems and solve them in clear ways,” he said. “It also suggests with all of these wins (against gerrymandering) that it’s the Supreme Court that’s really out of step.”
Also last week, Texas officials agreed to stop their investigation into alleged voting by non-citizens, which was based on false claims of voter fraud. That encouraging move came only after a court ruling.
In January, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley said 95,000 non-citizens were on the state’s voter rolls and that 58,000 had voted in recent elections. His office used this assertion to direct county officials to begin the process of purging these people from the state’s voter rolls if they did not send proof of their citizenship within 30 days.
But the state’s information was incorrect and thousands of naturalized citizens, who can legally vote, were targeted.
The official end of the investigation came after a federal court judge ruled against the state earlier this year. Judge Fred Biery called the state’s efforts “ham-handed” and “threatening” and noted that no native-born Americans were subject to this treatment.
In a case with more impact in Maine, a federal judge last week issued a nationwide injunction to stop Trump administration rules to restrict how family planning clinics talked to their patients about abortion services. The so-called gag rule would affect clinics that receive federal funding for health services, disproportionately impacting low-income women. Federal funding cannot be used to provide abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life.
The Maine Family Planning Association had sought a similar injunction in federal court in Maine. It withdrew that request after last week’s ruling from the U.S. District Court in Washington.
Judge Stanley Bastian criticized the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for making the rule change without “reasoned analysis” of its consequences, which include impeding access to health care.
These rulings are an important reminder that trying to gain political advantage or seeking to enforce an ideology do not trump the separation of powers or the rule of law.
This editorial originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News on April 30.
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