Rob Yablon oped:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has set the stage for another decade of gerrymandered electoral maps. For Wisconsinites across the political spectrum who are fed up with partisan redistricting abuses, the court’s decision is a gut punch — and a glaring departure from past judicial practice.

When federal judges did the work in Wisconsin in prior decades, they emphatically rejected biased maps. By failing to do the same, this court has taken a wrong turn that could seriously tarnish its institutional credibility. If the court is unwilling to change course, it should bow out entirely and once again leave redistricting to the federal courts.

Wisconsin’s existing maps are among the most skewed in the country. Lawmakers produced them in 2011 using what a federal court later criticized as a “sharply partisan methodology.”  Another federal court found that lawmakers aimed to “entrench the Republican party in power” and succeeded in doing just that. …

For whatever reason, the Wisconsin Supreme Court hasn’t deferred to the federal courts this time around. Instead, the court voted 4-3 to jump headlong into the fray. And in a big win for the Legislature and its allies, that same four-justice majority has now decided to adopt new maps that hew as closely as possible to the existing gerrymandered maps. 

Under this so-called least-change approach, the lines the Legislature’s Republican leaders drew back in 2011 will be tweaked only to the extent necessary to re-equalize district populations in a legally compliant manner. Unlike the federal judges who previously drew Wisconsin’s lines, the state Supreme Court majority expressly rebuffed calls for partisan fairness….