Editorial: Illinois Supreme Court's refusal to hear gerrymandering case is a blow to democracy
Last month, we urged Illinois Supreme Court justices to consider state Republicans' strong arguments against extreme gerrymandering in the Land of Lincoln. To no one's surprise, on Wednesday the Democratic majority on the high court seized on a technicality to avoid confronting the obvious and refused to hear the GOP's case.
That leaves intact legislative maps that badly undermine democracy in Illinois. Any reasonable, non-partisan person looking at the facts would arrive at that conclusion. State House districts are so distorted that GOP candidates won 45% of the total vote for the Illinois House of Representatives in 2024 and just 34% of the seats.
That's plain wrong, and the justices ought to be ashamed.
After multiple failed attempts in the past two decades to get a fair hearing before the Supreme Court, the GOP thought this time might be different. A lawsuit led by House Minority Leader Tony McCombie presented hard data, strong arguments that numerous bizarrely shaped districts violate the state Constitution, and even responded to court decisions in the past that had tossed GOP litigation because it was filed too close to an election.
Nothing doing.
The court refused to take up this latest case, not based on its merits but because the majority of justices said the plaintiffs waited too long to act. There's no winning with this bunch, which appears content to oversee a judicial version of Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
While Illinois' high court declined to intervene, our neighbors to the north took a different, more encouraging path. Wisconsin's Supreme Court contest between conservative Brad Schimel and liberal Susan Crawford recently garnered intense national attention as a referendum of sorts on the early months of the Trump administration. Crawford prevailed, which cheered Democrats and worried Republicans.
But even before that contest, Wisconsin's high court had thrown out the Badger State's gerrymandered maps, ruling in December 2023 that similarly distorted district boundaries favoring the GOP in that state were unconstitutional.
Equally as important, and to the surprise of many, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers in February 2024 compromised with the GOP-run legislature on new maps that are said to slightly favor the Republicans but are far fairer than the districts the court rejected. 'Wisconsin, when I promised I wanted fair maps — not maps that are better for one party or another — I damn well meant it,' Evers said.
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said much the same when he first ran for office in 2019. But he most definitely didn't mean it. And the Supreme Court has been happy to play along.
'Plaintiffs could have brought their argument years ago,' the majority wrote in an unsigned decision. 'Their claim that waiting multiple election cycles is necessary to reveal the effects of redistricting is unpersuasive.'
That's the court's take. To us, the proof is undeniable. Illinois' political maps don't yield results that represent the will of the people. The justices missed a golden opportunity to emulate our neighbors to the north and instead have left too many voters dispirited and feeling like nothing can ever change.
As lawmakers in Wisconsin and Illinois have demonstrated, partisan gerrymandering is a bipartisan pursuit when the party in power has carte blanche to pick its own voters. When that happens, the judiciary — an equal branch of government — is tasked with upholding the Constitution, not aiding and abetting its partisan friends.
Illinois' Supreme Court justices failed that most basic test.
Nationally, the Democratic Party in November failed to connect with independent and centrist voters who usually determine the outcome of elections in a relatively evenly divided country. Democratic hegemony in Illinois hasn't produced a thriving state; to the contrary, Illinois isn't growing, and its economic performance lags the nation as a whole.
A political party that has no fear of losing power too often is a political party that refuses to entertain new ideas or reconsider its own orthodoxies.
The path to Democratic renewal is not through disenfranchising voters. This was a highly unfortunate missed opportunity.
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