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Page Number: 4.0

4 

RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE 

Syllabus 

crats.  It applied a three-part test, examining intent, effects, and cau-
sation.  The District Court’s “predominant intent” prong is borrowed 
from the test used in racial gerrymandering cases.  However, unlike 
race-based  decisionmaking,  which  is  “inherently  suspect,”  Miller  v. 
Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 915, districting for some level of partisan ad-
vantage is not unconstitutional.  Determining that lines were drawn
on  the  basis  of  partisanship  does  not  indicate  that  districting  was 
constitutionally  impermissible.    The  Common  Cause  District  Court 
also required the plaintiffs to show that vote dilution is “likely to per-
sist” to such a degree that the elected representatives will feel free to
ignore the concerns of the supporters of the minority party.  Experi-
ence proves that accurately predicting electoral outcomes is not sim-
ple,  and  asking  judges  to  predict  how  a  particular  districting  map 
will  perform  in  future  elections  risks  basing  constitutional  holdings 
on  unstable  ground  outside  judicial  expertise.    The  District  Court’s 
third prong—which gave the defendants an opportunity to show that
discriminatory  effects  were  due  to  a  “legitimate  redistricting  objec-
tive”—just  restates  the  question  asked  at  the  “predominant  intent” 
prong.  Pp. 22–25.

(2) The  District  Courts  also  found  partisan  gerrymandering
claims  justiciable  under  the  First  Amendment,  coalescing  around  a 
basic  three-part  test:  proof  of  intent  to  burden  individuals  based  on
their voting history or party affiliation, an actual burden on political
speech  or  associational  rights,  and  a  causal  link  between  the  invidi-
ous intent and actual burden.  But their analysis offers no “clear” and 
“manageable”  way  of  distinguishing  permissible  from  impermissible
partisan motivation.  Pp. 25–27.

(3) Using  a  State’s  own  districting  criteria  as  a  baseline  from 
which  to  measure  how  extreme  a  partisan  gerrymander  is  would  be
indeterminate  and  arbitrary.  Doing  so  would  still  leave  open  the 
question  of  how  much  political  motivation  and  effect  is  too  much. 
Pp. 27–29.   

(4) The North Carolina District Court further held that the 2016 
Plan violated Article I, §2, and the Elections Clause, Art. I,  §4, cl. 1. 
But the Vieth plurality concluded—without objection from any other 
Justice—that neither §2 nor §4 “provides a judicially enforceable limit 
on  the  political  considerations  that  the  States  and  Congress  may 
take into account when districting.”  541 U. S., at 305.  Any assertion 
that partisan gerrymanders violate the core right of voters to choose 
their  representatives  is  an  objection  more  likely  grounded  in  the 
Guarantee  Clause  of  Article  IV,  §4,  which  “guarantee[s]  to  every 
State in [the] Union a Republican Form of Government.”  This Court 
has several times concluded that the Guarantee Clause does not pro-