The weight of the evidence, she said, “yields the conclusion that the 2021 Congressional Plan in Maryland is an ‘outlier,’ an extreme gerrymander that subordinates constitutional criteria to political considerations.”
Battaglia enjoined the map from being used in this year’s primary and general elections in Maryland and ordered the General Assembly to redraw the map by Wednesday — a furious deadline for what has often been a weeks-long process.
A spokeswoman for the Maryland Attorney General’s Office said the office is still reviewing the decision and that it had not made a decision about whether to appeal.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) called the ruling “a monumental victory for every Marylander who cares about protecting our democracy, bringing fairness to our elections, and putting the people back in charge.”
The governor encouraged the General Assembly to the adopt the maps drawn by his citizen advisory committee, which the legislature previously rejected.
“This is a historic milestone in our fight to clean up the political process in our state, and ensure that the voices of the people we are elected to serve are finally heard,” he said.
Legislative leaders who crafted and shepherded the map to approval defended it Friday evening, saying in a joint statement “we believed then, as we do now, that the new districts upheld the letter of the law.”
House Speaker Adrienne Jones (D-Baltimore County) and Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) said in their joint statement that the judge’s order “establishes brand new legal standards for the drawing of the Maryland Congressional map.”
Battaglia had anticipated during the trial that the case would likely head to the Maryland Court of Appeals, as this summer’s primary elections fast approach. And its final outcome could have big consequences in the midterm elections both for Maryland and nationally as Democrats’ majority in Congress hangs by a thread.
Maryland’s congressional map — passed on an overwhelming party-line vote in December — created seven safe Democratic seats and put the state’s sole Republican incumbent in Congress, Rep. Andy Harris, in jeopardy by making the 1st district competitive.
Fair Maps Maryland, an anti-gerrymandering group aligned with Hogan, said Battaglia’s ruling finally moves the state closer to ending partisan gerrymandering that has long favored Democrats.
“To call this a big deal would be the understatement of the century,” the statement read. “Judge Battaglia’s ruling confirms what we have all known for years — Maryland is ground zero for gerrymandering, our districts and political reality reek of it, and there is abundant proof that it is occurring. Marylanders have been fighting for free and fair elections for decades and for the first time in our state’s shameful history of gerrymandering, we are at the precipice of ending it.”
Battaglia joins a growing cohort of state judges across the country who have been willing to take on partisan gerrymandering after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 said federal courts were not the proper avenue for those challenges. In the battle for control of Congress this November, both parties have used partisan gerrymandering to try to maximize their chances of winning the majority. But in high-stakes legal challenges, some state judges have put up roadblocks. State high courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania have thrown out maps they found impermissibly advantaged Republicans, while several other cases are pending.
In this case, Republican plaintiffs had argued that the congressional map — which passed the General Assembly on an overwhelming party-line vote in December — violated the Maryland Constitution’s protections of free speech, free and frequent elections and its equal protection clause by suppressing the strength of Republican…
Read More: Judge throws out Maryland congressional map over ‘extreme’ gerrymandering