This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Two reading lessons from the Supreme Court — George F. Will | The Washington Post

"Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) supposedly is a better idea. It was created by a state constitutional amendment passed by voter initiative. The commission is composed of five members. Four of them are chosen by the majority and minority leaders of the two parties in the two legislative chambers — but these leaders must pick from a list of just 25 (of the 4.9 million Arizonans of voting age) selected by another state commission, one for appellate court appointments. No member of the Legislature may serve on the IRC. It draws congressional district maps that are not subject to even such checks as a gubernatorial veto or referendum. The Legislature's role is reduced to submitting nonbinding recommendations to the IRC — "a function without consequence," as the Legislature says in its brief to the court.

"The question is whether this process, which reduces the Arizona Legislature's role to the vanishing point, complies with the Constitution's mandate that the "manner" of elections shall be "prescribed" by the state's legislature. The Supreme Court's Elections Clause jurisprudence permits limited checks on the legislature's redistricting prerogative, such as a governor's veto. It has, however, never authorized a state to divest its legislature of all meaningful power to prescribe district lines.

"Clearly the clause restricts states' abilities to do what the IRC does — nullify the Arizona Legislature's primacy in the redistricting process. The "I" in the IRC denotes independence from the Legislature.

"To the suit brought by Arizona's Legislature, the IRC's limp response is that the Elections Clause uses "legislature" to denote any process, such as a referendum, that creates any entity, such as the IRC, that produces binding edicts. Surely, however, in writing the Elections Clause the Framers used the word "legislature" as it was and still is generally understood, to mean the representative body that makes a state's laws. Arizona cannot strip its Legislature of a power that flows to it from the U.S. Constitution. ..."

Court should not shield gerrymandering from voters — Bloomberg View Editorial

"It's hard not to be cynical about politics when legislators pick their voters before voters pick their legislators. Arizona has devised a creative way to address this problem — and it should be allowed to proceed. ...

" ... In addition, briefs submitted by the law's defenders argue convincingly that when the Constitution was written, "legislature" was understood to mean the people or the state generally, not an elected body. That interpretation is not novel: The Supreme Court effectively affirmed it in a 1916 case upholding the right of voters to veto a districting law passed by the legislature.

"If the court overturns that precedent, any election law established by initiative could become void, and the initiative process — which helped open the ballot to women in Arizona and has been used to advance all types of election laws around the country, from party primaries to voter identification requirements — would be severely restricted. ..."