Coming off their recent victory in enacting new state legislative maps, Democrats are now calling on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to strike down the state’s congressional district boundaries.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Monday encouraged the justices to revisit the maps it selected in 2022 since it recently overturned the rationale for choosing them.
“We want to end gerrymandering in Wisconsin at every level, so I’m asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to review our congressional maps to make sure those are fair, too,” Evers said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Evers then sent the court a letter on Monday, saying he wants the court to revisit the congressional maps decision and stands ready to participate in future proceedings.
Republicans criticized the governor for his request, pointing out that he drew the exact maps he now wants the court to reconsider.
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“I’d like to remind (Gov. Evers) that he is asking the State Supreme Court to review the Congressional maps HE drew,” Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald said.
“It comes as no surprise that Tony Evers would shamelessly pressure the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out his own maps,” Republican Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Matt Fisher said in a statement, saying out-of-state donors were funding the lawsuit and had funded the campaign of one of the justices deciding it.
While Evers did draw the current congressional maps, he did so under legal requirements that gave him little latitude.
Evers’ congressional maps were enacted two years ago after a court battle triggered by the governor’s unwillingness to sign into law any maps passed by the GOP-passed Legislature.
Taking charge of the state’s redistricting process, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which had a conservative majority at the time, asked for new map submissions. But in doing so, the court set a “least-change” standard, which called for boundaries with as few changes as possible from the prior set of maps.
That earlier set of maps had strengthened Republicans’ majority in the 7th Congressional District in northern Wisconsin while giving Democrats a boost in the 3rd Congressional District in western Wisconsin. Republicans passed the maps through the Legislature in 2011 without receiving any Democratic votes, and Republican former Gov. Scott Walker signed them into law.
Because the court in 2021 called for congressional maps similar to those previous GOP maps, Evers was unable to draw the boundaries Democrats likely would have preferred.
Still, the high court in 2022 chose his congressional maps, which increased the number of competitive districts from one to two. Six of the state’s eight congressional districts under those maps are held by Republicans. The boundaries heavily favor the GOP, according to the redistricting analysis site PlanScore.
A year after the high court chose Evers’ maps, though, liberals took control of Supreme Court and shortly after overturned the “least-change” approach used in the prior redistricting case, saying the standard could run afoul of other legal requirements that must be met in the redistricting process.
A couple of weeks after that ruling, a prominent Democratic law firm asked the high court to toss the state’s congressional maps since the court overruled the rationale for choosing them in the first place.