BY SUSAN TEBBEN
In a drastic change from previous rulings, a partisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court chose to leave Statehouse redistricting maps in place for 2024, denying a challenge to the constitutionality of the newest maps.
In a 4-3 ruling released Monday evening, right-wing justices on the court pointed to the bipartisan support of the district maps adopted in September as one reason to dismiss challenges filed by the ACLU and anti-gerrymandering groups.
“The bipartisan adoption of the September 2023 plan is a changed circumstance that makes it appropriate to relinquish our continuing jurisdiction over these cases,” Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, along with fellow justices Patrick Fischer, Patrick DeWine and Joseph Deters.
That bipartisan support “means that it is effective for the 2024-through-2030 election cycles,” the majority wrote.
All five of the previous Statehouse maps were rejected by the former bipartisan court majority when Republican Maureen O’Connor was chief justice, based on arguments by anti-gerrymandering groups that the maps were unduly partisan, favoring Republicans in a way that map challengers said did not match the election trends of the last 10 years.
Those same arguments were made when the groups sued to reverse the most recent map.
The lopsided partisan lean joined with a lack of bipartisan support for any of the maps, showing a divided and broken process throughout the last two years, according to the League of Women Voters, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, and other groups who filed lawsuits against the maps.
The congressional maps also received constitutional challenges to their partisanship, for which they received two bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court rejections. But those suing to get the map thrown out asked the court to dismiss their claims so they could focus on reforming the redistricting process, rather than fighting legal battles until 2024.
The congressional maps were also not bipartisan adoptions.
That lack of support from both political parties represented on the Ohio Redistricting Commission also meant the plans would only last for two election cycles (four years).
Members of the redistricting commission, specifically state Sen. Rob McColley, state Rep. Jeff LaRe and Secretary of State Frank LaRose asked the court to dismiss the Statehouse redistricting case based on the bridging of that partisan divide in September’s map adoption.
In voting to adopt the maps in September, House Minority Leader Allison Russo said her vote was not an endorsement of the process, instead her vote “is simply to take this process out of the hands of this commission.”
Her counterpart in the Ohio Senate, Minority Leader Nickie Antonio had a similar perspective on her “yes” vote for the maps, pushing for the process to move to a citizen’s redistricting commission, as is proposed in a constitutional amendment for which supporters are currently collection signatures to place the measure on the ballot.
The effort to reform the redistricting process in the state is led by one person who was a first-hand participant in the rejection of the last five Statehouse maps: now-retired Chief Justice O’Connor.
O’Connor was the swing vote leading to the rejection of the previous Statehouse maps, and since she left the court because of age limits, she has taken on the challenge of taking the process out of the hands of the fully-elected-official-led ORC and into a new independent commission made up of non-elected state citizens.
Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in dissent of Monday’s ruling, and spoke of those previous dissents, on which she joined O’Connor in rejecting the maps.
During the entire process, “the (current) commission has never appeared to be willing or capable of complying with our orders or the Ohio Constitution,” she wrote in her dissent.
“Instead, it has taken the unprecedented position of refusing our orders, delaying these cases and disobeying our deadlines,” Brunner wrote.
The commission missed a June 2022 deadline this time around as well, she said.
A former secretary of state, Brunner said there is “no procedural or legal basis for granting the motions to dismiss” in the case, and called the suggestion that the bipartisan vote changes the circumstances “illusory.”
Nothing in the Ohio Constitution’s clauses on redistricting explains that such agreement on a redistricting plan “renders it presumptively constitutional, and we have flatly rejected that idea,” Brunner wrote.
“When the fairness of legislative-district maps is in contention, the last thing we should do is to essentially bless a unanimous deal between the state’s major political parties and permit it to go constitutionally unchecked,” she said in her dissent.
Justices Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart concurred with Brunner in her dissent.
Spokespeople for Russo and Antonio did not respond to requests for comment on Monday night.
Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, used the decision as a call-to-action for the redistricting constitutional amendment.
“Ohio voters deserve fair representation in the Statehouse and congress, which can only be achieved when we take mapping out of the hands of corrupt politicians,” Miller said in a statement.
