Pennsylvania House majority leader challenges new legislative maps, calls them unconstitutional

Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff wants the state Supreme Court to toss out newly created state House and Senate districts, and to require the 2022 election to be conducted under 2012 maps.

Benninghoff submitted a petition for review to the Supreme Court that alleges maps adopted by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission violate the state and federal constitutions by prioritizing race and political affiliations over traditional redistricting criteria.

Benninghoff was the lone member of the commission to vote against the final maps on Feb. 4 after members voted down an amendment to the final House map he said would reduce population deviations, remove municipal splits in several cities, and increase minority voting power.

“Several House districts in the 2021 Final Plan were drawn predominantly based upon race without a narrowly tailored compelling state interest in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 29 of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” the petition reads. “The 2021 Final Plan thus unnecessarily subjects itself to liability for racial gerrymandering claims.”

The 282-page petition claims several aspects of the final plan are designed to give Democrats an advantage, including unnecessary splits, reallocating prisoners to their pre-incarceration residences, and excessive population deviations.

The four-member commission is comprised of House and Senate majority and minority leaders, and Mark Nordenberg, the former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh who was appointed chairman by the Democrat-controlled Supreme Court. Republicans in the General Assembly have accused Nordenberg of conspiring with Democrats on the committee to gerrymander districts in their favor.

In his petition, Benninghoff points to 50,000 computer simulated plans of House districts drawn using only constitutional criteria with “no partisan or racial data” that demonstrate the political bias in the map.

The “50,000 simulated plans are consistent with the 2021 Final Plan in terms of population deviation, county and municipal splits, contiguity, and compactness,” according to the petition. “However, unbiased simulations reflect that the 2021 Final Plan generates more Democratic-leaning districts than 99.998% of the simulated maps.

“The most common outcome in the simulations is 97 Democratic seats, yet the 2021 Final Plan is predicted to result in 107 Democratic seats using an index of 2012-2020 elections. This is a statistically significant finding demonstrating that the dramatically large number of Democratic-leaning districts in the plan cannot be explained by adherence to the constitutional redistricting criteria set forth in Article II, Section 16 of the constitution.”

Benninghoff is asking the Supreme Court to remand the 2021 Final Plan to the commission with a directive to make several changes to: eliminate unnecessary splits, reduce total population deviation in both the House and Senate maps, redraw legislative districts without race as the predominant factor, and to ensure the plan doesn’t “subordinate traditional redistricting criteria for partisan gain.”

The petition also asks the high court to “issue an order that because the commission failed to timely adopt a reapportionment plan that meets the requirements of the Pennsylvania Constitution, the 2022 elections for the Pennsylvania General Assembly must occur under the districts adopted in 2012.”

“The plan at issue is an extreme partisan gerrymander: It has splits that are not ‘absolutely necessary,’ it has an excessive population deviation that violates one person, one vote, and is an inappropriate and illegal racial gerrymander,” Benninghoff said in a statement. “It is clear the only way to remedy these obvious flaws now is for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to send this plan back to the drawing board.”

The Supreme Court ordered all petitions, briefs and challenges to the Legislative Reapportionment Commission’s final plan to be submitted by March 7, and is giving the commission until March 11 to respond. The order states “petitions for review will be decided on submitted briefs” rather than oral arguments.