Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Pennsylvania chooses a map while gerrymandering lawsuits progress in the South

Pennsylvania redistricting
NSA Digital Archive/Getty Images

About three quarters of states have finished drawing their new congressional maps for the coming decade. As more states conclude the process, courtroom wrangling over partisan gerrymandering is heating up.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court settled on a new congressional map on Wednesday, avoiding a potentially fascinating call for at-large elections. And recent legal maneuvering in Alabama and Arkansas indicates partisans believe there is still advantage to be gained through the courts regardless of how mapmakers complete their assignments.

Pennsylvania’s congressional primary is set for May 17. Alabama and Arkansas are both scheduled to hold primaries on May 24.


Alabama

Perhaps the most important case involves the new congressional map in Alabama, which the Supreme Court will consider in the fall.

A lower court ruled in January that the map signed into law in November 2021 violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voice of Black voters. The new district lines, drawn by Republican legislators and approved by a Republican governor, include one majority-Black district, even though Black people represent 27 percent of the state’s population, a slight increase from the 2020 census.

The district court ordered new maps to be drawn but Alabama’s attorney general appealed the ruling, and the Supreme Court announced it would hear oral arguments in October. In agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court also directed the state to proceed with its elections using the approved maps.

“The stay order is not a ruling on the merits, but instead simply stays the District Court’s injunction pending a ruling on the merits,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote.

Alabama’s congressional map was included in a list of a dozen “ extreme gerrymanders ” produced by the cross-partisan democracy reform organization Issue One.

“In 2020, then-President Donald Trump carried Alabama by 25.4 percentage points — winning 62% of the vote compared to Joe Biden’s 36.6%. Yet experts predict that Republicans will likely control 86% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives under the new map passed in the state legislature by Alabama Republicans without any support from Alabama Democrats,” the report states.

Arkansas

Advocates for tossing out the new state House map in Arkansas suffered a setback on Tuesday, when a federal judge dismissed their case.

U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky ruled that the plaintiffs —the Arkansas Public Policy Panel and the Arkansas State Conference NAACP — had no standing to bring the case once the Justice Department decided not to get involved, reports NPR’s Little Rock affiliate.

According to the two groups, Arkansas mapmakers should have created 16 majority-Black districts (out of 100), rather than the 11 they approved. Nearly 17 percent of the Arkansas population is Black.

Pennsylvania

The most unusual move of the week occurred in Pennsylvania, where a group of Republicans asked the state Supreme Court on Monday to refrain from picking a congressional map. Instead, they want all of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House members chosen in an at-large election. However, the state Supreme Court set that argument aside and picked a map on Wednesday.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, vetoed the congressional map approved by the Republican legislators. That action moved the battle to a state court that was tasked with recommending a final map to the state Supreme Court. The lower court recommended the GOP map to the top court, which is dominated by Democrats.

And the Supreme Court picked a proposal, known as the Carter map, that is favored by Democratic plaintiffs but also beneficial to Republicans, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The selected map appears to be an acceptable compromise in a field where outside groups were also able to offer proposals.

“While we are disappointed that our proposed map was not selected, we believe that the Carter plan successfully holds most of the state’s communities of interest together, includes reasonably compact districts, and likely will produce a congressional delegation roughly in line with the preferences of voters across the state,” said Ben Geffen, an attorney representing a group of voters.

The lawsuit, brought by five Republicans (including two congressional candidates and a county commissioner), had argued the U.S. Constitution bars state courts from getting involved in congressional elections. They point to the elections clause, which empowers legislatures, not the courts.

According to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, the plaintiffs believe that because the state is losing a congressional seat, a federal law requires Pennsylvania to conduct an at-large election in which all candidates would appear on every voter’s ballot.

That law states that when a state loses a U.S. House seat, “Until a State is redistricted in the manner provided by the law … [members of the House] shall be elected from the State at large.”

Read More

Mad About Politics? Blame Congress

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders celebrate after the vote on President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 3, 2025.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/TNS

Mad About Politics? Blame Congress

The judiciary isn’t supposed to be the primary check on the executive, the legislative branch is.

Whatever you think about American politics and government, whether you are on the right, the left or somewhere in the middle, you should be mad at Congress. I don’t just mean the Republican-controlled Congress — though, by all means, be mad at them — I mean the institution as a whole.

Keep ReadingShow less
Jennifer Greenfield Speaks Out for Colorado Families

Jennifer Greenfield Speaks Out for Colorado Families

When Jennifer Greenfield wrote an op-ed in The Denver Post warning that proposed federal budget cuts would devastate Coloradans who rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP, she hoped her words might help change the conversation—and the outcome. Her piece drew a wave of responses, including appreciation from state leaders and an invitation to speak at a local event. Although the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” ultimately became law, Greenfield continues to warn about its long-term consequences. She spoke with SSN about the ripple effects of her op-ed and shared advice for fellow scholars who want their research to make a difference. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A with Jennifer Greenfield

You recently wrote an op-ed about the GOP’s budget bill. What message were you hoping to get across?

Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. Capitol

James Madison foresaw factions tearing apart democracy. Today’s Congress, driven by partisanship and money, proves his warning true.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Our Amazing, Shrinking Congress

James Madison tried to warn us. He foresaw a grave danger to our fragile republic. No, it wasn’t an overreaching, dictatorial President. It was the people’s representatives themselves who might shred the untested constitutional fabric of the nascent United States.

Members of Congress could destroy it by neglecting the good of the country in favor of narrow, self-serving ends. Unity would collapse into endless internecine strife. Madison sounded this alarm in Federalist No. 10: he foresaw the inevitable emergence of “factions”—political parties “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who's the Most Patriotic of All?

Trump and the MAGA movement have twisted the meaning of patriotism. It’s time we collectively reclaim America’s founding ideals and the Pledge’s promise.

Getty Images, LeoPatrizi

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who's the Most Patriotic of All?

Republicans have always claimed to be the patriotic party, the party of "America, right or wrong," the party willing to use force to protect American national interests abroad, the party of a strong military. In response, Democrats have not really contested this perspective since Vietnam, basically ceding the patriotic badge to the Republicans.

But with the advent of Donald Trump, the Republican claim to patriotism has gotten broader and more troubling. Republicans now claim to be the party that is true to our founding principles. And it is not just the politicians; they have support from far-right scholars at the Heritage Foundation, such as Matthew Spalding. The Democratic Party has done nothing to counter these claims.

Keep ReadingShow less