Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf
Page Number: 67.0

28 

RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

Illicit purpose was simple to show here only because poli-
ticians and mapmakers thought their actions could not be 
attacked  in  court.    See  Rucho,  318  F. Supp.  3d,  at  808 
(quoting Lewis’s statements to that effect).  They therefore
felt  free  to  openly  proclaim  their  intent  to  entrench  their
party in office.  See supra, at 4–6.  But if the Court today 
had declared that behavior justiciable, such smoking guns
would  all  but  disappear.    Even  assuming  some  officials
continued  to  try  implementing  extreme  partisan  gerry-
manders,5  they  would  not  brag  about  their  efforts.    So 
plaintiffs  would  have  to  prove  the  intent  to  entrench 
through  circumstantial  evidence—essentially  showing
that  no  other  explanation  (no  geographic  feature  or  non-
partisan districting objective) could explain the districting 
plan’s vote dilutive effects.  And that would be impossible 
unless  those  effects  were  even  more  than  substantial— 
unless mapmakers had packed and cracked with abandon
in unprecedented ways.  As again, they did here.  That the 
two  courts  below  found  constitutional  violations  does  not 
mean  their  tests  were  unrigorous;  it  means  that  the  con-
duct  they  confronted  was  constitutionally  appalling—by 
even the strictest measure, inordinately partisan.

The  majority,  in  the  end,  fails  to  understand  both  the
plaintiffs’  claims  and  the  decisions  below.    Everything  in
today’s  opinion  assumes  that  these  cases  grew  out  of  a 
“desire for proportional representation” or, more generally 
phrased, a “fair share of political power.”  Ante, at 16, 21. 
And everything in it assumes that the courts below had to
(and did) decide what that fair share would be.  But that is 

—————— 

5 A decision of this Court invalidating the North Carolina and Mary-
land gerrymanders would of course have curbed much of that behavior. 
In  districting  cases  no  less  than  others,  officials  respond  to  what  this 
Court  determines  the  law  to  sanction.    See,  e.g.,  Charles  &  Fuentes-
Rohwer, Judicial Intervention as Judicial  Restraint,  132 Harv. L. Rev. 
236, 269 (2018) (discussing how the Court’s prohibition of racial gerry-
manders affected districting).