Illinois lawmakers punt remap amendment after SCOTUS Voting Rights Act ruling

SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers are not planning to pursue a constitutional amendment on redistricting after a key U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday.

Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, told Capitol News Illinois that Senate Democrats decided not to call an amendment that passed House last week after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a hefty blow the federal Voting Rights Act. If approved by voters, it would have rewritten the state’s redistricting rules.

“We want to spend a little bit of time unpacking the Supreme Court decision to make sure we get it right and protect the voting rights of Illinois residents,” Harmon said. “It’s much better and much more important to get this correct than to do it quickly. The worst thing that would happen is if we rushed and there were unintended consequences that undermine people’s voting rights.”

But that means the matter will have to wait until at least 2028, as lawmakers faced a May 3 deadline to approve constitutional amendments for voters to consider in November.

The proposed amendment would have inserted a provision from the Voting Rights Act into the state constitution to specifically direct lawmakers to consider race in drawing district lines.

The Voting Rights Act provision has long been interpreted as a ban on splitting large minority groups into multiple legislative districts to dilute their voting power.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, struck down Louisiana’s congressional map on Wednesday, ruling a district drawn to consolidate Black voters was illegally gerrymandered based on race. While the decision did not broadly eliminate the section of the Voting Rights Act, dissenting liberal Justice Elena Kagan suggested it is “all but a dead letter.”

Racial intent

David Becker, founder and executive editor of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, called the decision a “radical” change in the way voting rights cases are now reviewed.

“When I woke up this morning, we had a functional Voting Rights Act,” he said during a media briefing on the case Wednesday. “And unfortunately, I can’t say that anymore.”

Prior to Wednesday’s decision, he said, plaintiffs in voting rights cases only had to show that a set of maps had the effect of diluting a minority group’s voting strength, not that there was a specific intent to discriminate.

Wednesday’s decision, he said, reverses that standard and provides what he called “a clear roadmap” for how a state legislature can engage in racial gerrymandering without it being declared illegal.

“All it has to do is to be very careful about talking about intent,” he said. “Don’t talk about intent at all. Couch everything in partisanship. And then it can’t even be really reviewed because racial effects aren’t going to be enough to establish a violation, even if those racial effects are stark.”

Illinois reaction

Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, D-Hillside, said fear that the court would strike down protections for racial groups inspired him to pursue the constitutional amendment. While the court did not go that far, the ruling that lawmakers cannot draw maps based on race affirmed many Democrats’ fears.

Read more: House approves redistricting amendment, fearing federal Voting Rights Act will be eliminated

“The decision by the Supreme Court today on the Voting Rights Act is an abomination,” Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters in Chicago. “It is an attack on a crown jewel of our democracy.”

Illinois’ proposed amendment would’ve established a priority list stating what factors lawmakers should consider in the redistricting process. It stated they should draw districts “to be substantially equal in population; to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race; to create, where practical, racial coalition or influence Districts; to be contiguous; and to the extent practicable, to be compact.”

Harmon said the ruling “highlights how much the court would frown upon race being a predominant factor in drawing districts.”

The Illinois Voting Rights Act, which was established in 2011, requires lawmakers to create “crossover” districts where minority groups are a large enough share of the population to potentially elect their preferred candidate and “influence” districts where a racial minority is large enough to sway the outcome of an election toward their preferred candidate.

Political fight

House Republicans argued last week that the amendment was in response to a lawsuit they filed last year that sought to overturn the state’s legislative maps by alleging dozens of districts failed to meet a decades-old Illinois Supreme Court precedent that defined an appropriately compact map. The Illinois Supreme Court ultimately tossed the lawsuit, ruling it was filed too late.

They said the proposed constitutional amendment would give Democrats more leeway to draw heavily gerrymandered districts that snake around communities.

“This Supreme Court decision addresses the very gerrymandering efforts the Democrats are hoping to codify into Illinois law with this Constitutional Amendment,” the Illinois Freedom Caucus, a group of far-right Republicans, said in a statement. “(House Joint Constitutional Amendment 28) is now, very clearly, unconstitutional.”

New congressional maps are not in General Assembly Democrats’ plans for now either. The possibility was floated last year as other states began redrawing their boundaries to increase partisan representation in Congress, but talks in Illinois faded after Indiana Republicans decided not to attempt a mid-decade remap.

“I think we have an excellent congressional map that reflects the communities of interest across the state,” Harmon said. “I’m not sure that we could, and if we could, whether we should draw a district that leans more one way or the other.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.