By BEN SZALINSKI
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]
SPRINGFIELD – Illinois House Republicans waited too long to file a lawsuit challenging legislative maps drawn in 2021, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
As a result, the Democrat-majority court will not hear the case.
House Republican Leader Tony McCombie, R-Savanna, along with a group of individual voters, asked the court to reject the current legislative map for its partisan bias and lack of compactness. House Republicans wanted the court to appoint a special master redraw the districts.
They alleged the voting district maps are not “compact,” a requirement of the state constitution, which has led to allegations of gerrymandering in favor of Democrats.
The plaintiffs argued court cases in other states and at the federal level required them to gather data from multiple election cycles with the maps in place to show a pattern that proves the maps aren’t compact and were drawn for partisan benefit. But the court said McCombie’s caucus waited too long to make their case.
“Plaintiffs could have brought this argument years ago,” the court wrote in a short two-page opinion. “Their claim that waiting multiple election cycles is necessary to reveal the effects of redistricting is unpersuasive.”
Republican Justice David Overstreet was the lone dissenting justice.
“They had the chance to make this right just to give the voters the chance to pick their representatives instead of representatives picking their voters and they declined,” Rep. Dan Ugaste, R-Geneva, told reporters.
The court’s ruling follows a similar case in 2012 that challenged the compactness of the 2011 maps. In that case, the court dismissed the challenge as untimely even though it was filed just eight months after the maps were enacted.
Attorneys for House Speaker Chris Welch, D-Hillside, and Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, were allowed to intervene as defendants in the case, which was originally filed against the State Board of Elections.
“To allow plaintiffs to proceed now, mid-decade, with their proposed redistricting challenge would invite political parties to wait until they have a wave election and use their best election results to justify a partisan challenge to the legislative map,” the Democrats’ lawyers said in their filing.
The court wrote that five years since the 2020 census, population data might also be “stale.”
“Plaintiffs’ approach would also be prejudicial and create uncertainty for voters and officeholders alike, now and in the future, as to whether any redistricting plan in Illinois is ever final,” the court wrote.
The court’s decision not to hear arguments on the case is the latest blow to various Republican legal efforts to throw out maps drawn by lawmakers and instead force an independent commission to draw new maps.
A lawsuit from multiple parties challenging the map was dismissed in 2021 by a federal three-judge panel, which rejected arguments that the map diluted the voting strength of racial minorities.
The court’s ruling on Wednesday noted Republicans did not appeal those rulings.
The Illinois Supreme Court blocked a 2016 citizen-driven referendum attempting to create an independent redistricting commission. The lead plaintiff in that case was John Hooker, a now-convicted conspirator in the “ComEd Four” corruption case. Federal courts also rejected Republican efforts to throw out the 2011 legislative maps.
In the case thrown out Wednesday, Republicans argued that more than half of the current House Districts were less compact than a district the state’s high court tossed out in 1981. They also said Rep. Lisa Hernandez, D-Cicero, who led the House redistricting process for House Democrats in 2021, admitted during debate that the maps were drawn for her party’s political gain.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which assesses legislative maps around the country on several metrics, gave the current Illinois House map an “F” grade for its compactness metric.
Republican leaders said they will review possible additional legal options in this case, but their next steps toward enacting independent mapping will be outside of court. Rep. Ryan Spain, R-Peoria, said he wants to try another petition drive to force a ballot referendum on the issue.
“It’s up now to the voters to take this baton and run with it,” Spain told reporters. “We need to have voters initiate the redistricting reforms that were cut down.”
Republican lawmakers also want to pursue judicial ethics reform, arguing Democrat Justices Elizabeth Rochford and Mary K. O’Brien should have recused themselves from the case after receiving campaign contributions in 2022 from a political action committee run by Harmon, who intervened as a defendant in the case. 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.
