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Page Number: 7.0

2 

RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE 

Opinion of the Court 

of  the  plaintiffs,  and  the  defendants  appealed  directly  to
this Court. 

These  cases  require  us  to  consider  once  again  whether 
claims of excessive partisanship in districting are “justici-
able”—that is, properly suited for resolution by the federal 
courts.  This  Court  has  not  previously  struck  down  a 
districting  plan  as  an  unconstitutional  partisan  gerry-
mander,  and  has  struggled  without  success  over  the  past
several  decades  to  discern  judicially  manageable  stand-
ards  for  deciding  such  claims.  The  districting  plans  at
issue  here  are  highly  partisan,  by  any  measure.    The 
question  is  whether  the  courts  below  appropriately  exer-
cised  judicial  power  when  they  found  them  unconstitu-
tional as well. 

I 
A 
The  first  case  involves  a  challenge  to  the  congressional 
redistricting  plan  enacted  by  the  Republican-controlled 
North  Carolina  General  Assembly  in  2016.    Rucho  v. 
Common  Cause,  No.  18–422.    The  Republican  legislators
leading the redistricting effort instructed their mapmaker
to  use  political  data  to  draw  a  map  that  would  produce  a
congressional  delegation  of  ten  Republicans  and  three
Democrats.  318  F. Supp. 3d 777, 807–808 (MDNC 2018). 
As  one  of  the  two  Republicans  chairing  the  redistricting
committee  stated,  “I  think  electing  Republicans  is  better
than electing Democrats.  So I drew this map to help foster 
what  I  think  is  better  for  the  country.”  Id.,  at  809.  He 
further explained that the map was drawn with the aim of 
electing ten Republicans and three Democrats because he 
did “not believe it [would be] possible to draw a map with
11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”  Id., at 808.  One Demo-
cratic  state  senator  objected  that  entrenching  the  10–3
advantage  for  Republicans  was  not  “fair,  reasonable,  [or] 
balanced”  because,  as  recently  as  2012,  “Democratic  con-