Supreme Court declines to hear Kansas racial gerrymandering case, leaves congressional map in force

The US Supreme Court docket on Monday declined a request from voters in Kansas to evaluate a state courtroom choice they are saying permits for racial gerrymandering of congressional districts there.

In a controversial choice final 12 months, the Kansas Supreme Court docket upheld a Republican-drawn map that had been blocked by a decrease courtroom over partisan gerrymandering and the dilution of minority voting energy. The brand new congressional map cut up Wyandotte County – house to Kansas Metropolis – into two congressional districts for the primary time in a number of many years.

The courtroom didn’t disclose a vote rely.

The courtroom’s choice to not hear the case implies that the newly redrawn map will stay in play.

Kansas had requested the US Supreme Court docket to not take the case, arguing in courtroom papers that it lacked jurisdiction within the matter and that the state courtroom rightly determined the case.

The group of voters, represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Kansas and the Marketing campaign Authorized Heart, stated in courtroom papers that the Kansas Supreme Court docket “held that intentional racial discrimination in redistricting is unconstitutional provided that it prevents the formation of a majority-minority district.”

“Beneath this conception of the Fourteenth Modification, the place minority voters are fewer in quantity or extra dispersed, states have carte blanche to deliberately discriminate towards them in drawing districts – even when the legislature introduced that it acted particularly to drawback minority voters,” they wrote.

The voters had been asking the justices to think about whether or not the Fourteenth Modification bars “intentional racial discrimination in redistricting the place the minority voters discriminated towards aren’t sufficiently quite a few to kind a majority of eligible voters in a single-member district.”