WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: …The case concerns an amendment to the Arizona constitution that empowered a nonpartisan committee to create district maps — without input from or the approval of state lawmakers. Voters went over the heads of state legislators, limiting politicians’ regularly abused power to manipulate the political system. That’s the problem, Arizona’s legislature argues. The U.S. Constitution stipulates that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
Defenders of the reform argue that election procedures must emerge from a legislative process — which includes voter initiatives — not necessarily from the legislature itself. State legislatures’ control over federal electoral procedure has never been impervious to direct popular intervention. Voters through the years have imposed all sorts of procedural changes without their legislatures’ consent, and the court isn’t going to strike all of those down.
Paul D. Clement, the Arizona legislature’s attorney, didn’t have a great answer to why voters could do an end-run around state lawmakers in some instances of election reform but not in others. Yet he might have swayed the justices when he argued that the Constitution’s words, if they mean anything, preclude voters from “the most extreme case” of stripping state legislatures of their power to draw district lines, pretty much irreversibly. If the court agrees, Arizona’s lawmakers could go back into the business of distorting election results by aggregating and dividing voters into contorted districts, and the movement to fix the nation’s elections would be dealt a big setback… (more)
