Entrenchment

    

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday voted 5-4 to uphold Pennsylvania congressional districts drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature to put Democrats at a disadvantage, but it left open the door to future lawsuits alleging gerrymandering.

Democrats claimed that the Pennsylvania districts, configured to reflect population losses in the 2000 census, "sacrificed every traditional districting principle -- slashing through communities, splitting precincts, municipalities and counties and producing a map that can only be described as a contorted mess." But a federal court upheld the configuration in a decision that the high court affirmed yesterday.

Four justices, led by Antonin Scalia, would have used the Pennsylvania case to declare that complaints of partisan redistricting could never be brought before federal courts, no matter how much a new configuration favored one party or the other.

Scalia, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas would have overturned a 1986 decision in which the court held that some partisan gerrymandering could be so extreme as to violate the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

But Scalia couldn't persuade a fifth justice to sign his opinion, so yesterday's ruling goes into the Supreme Court record as a so-called "plurality" opinion, with limited application as a legal precedent.

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Souter, in one separate dissenting opinion also signed by Ginsburg, proposed a five-part test for determining whether unconstitutional gerrymandering had occurred. In another dissent, Breyer suggested this definition of unconstitutional gerrymandering: "the unjustified entrenchment in power of a political party that the voters have rejected."

» Top court upholds redistricting in Pennsylvania