The Constitution makes clear that legislative redistricting is a matter for the states and Congress, not the courts, to sort out.
If an adjective creates a redundancy, does preceding it with two other adjectives give the Supreme Court a reason to venture where it has never gone before? Come Tuesday, the Court will hear oral arguments urging it to referee gerrymandering in the drawing of congressional districts. The justices should, like Ulysses, listen to this siren song but bind themselves from obeying it.
The arguments will concern two cases: one from Maryland, where Republicans are aggrieved, another from North Carolina, where Democrats are unhappy. The practice the court will consider is (adjective one) “partisan gerrymandering.” This modifier, however, does not modify; there is no other kind of gerrymandering.
Tuesday’s issue is whether the court should attempt something for which it has neither an aptitude nor any constitutional warrant — concocting criteria for deciding when (adjective two) excessive partisan gerrymandering becomes (adjective three) unconstitutional.
Gerrymandering is generally as surreptitious as a brass band and is, always and everywhere, as political as lemonade is lemony. It is the drawing of district lines by faction A for the purpose of disadvantaging faction B. This practice is older than the republic: Pennsylvanians and North Carolinians were engaging in it in the first half of the 18th century, about a century before it acquired its name. (In 1812, Massachusetts Democratic-Republicans, serving Governor Elbridge Gerry, drew a district shaped like a salamander.)
Until 1962, the court stayed away from the inherently political process of the drawing of district lines by legislatures organized along partisan lines because…
