INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMM’N
Opinion of the Court
The Chief Justice, in dissent, suggests that independent commissions established by initiative are a high-minded experiment that has failed. Post, at 26–27. For this assessment, The Chief Justice cites a three-judge Federal District Court opinion, Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n, 993 F. Supp. 2d 1042 (Ariz. 2014). That opinion, he asserts, “detail[s] the partisanship that has affected the Commission.” Post, at 26. No careful reader could so conclude.
The report of the decision in Harris comprises a per curiam opinion, an opinion concurring in the judgment by Judge Silver, and a dissenting opinion by Judge Wake. The per curiam opinion found “in favor of the Commission.” 993 F. Supp. 2d, at 1080. Deviations from the one-person, one-vote principle, the per curiam opinion explained at length, were “small” and, in the main, could not be attributed to partisanship. Ibid. While partisanship “may have played some role,” the per curiam opinion stated, deviations were “predominantly a result of the Commission’s good-faith efforts to achieve preclearance under the Voting Rights Act.” Id., at 1060. Judge Silver, although she joined the per curiam opinion, made clear at the very outset of that opinion her finding that “partisanship did not play a role.” Id., at 1046, n. 1. In her concurring opinion, she repeated her finding that the evidence did not show partisanship at work, id., at 1087; instead, she found, the evidence “[was] overwhelming [that] the final map was a product of the commissioners’s consideration of appropriate redistricting criteria.” Id., at 1088. To describe Harris as a decision criticizing the Commission for pervasive partisanship, post, at 26, The Chief Justice could rely only upon the dissenting opinion, which expressed views the majority roundly rejected.
Independent redistricting commissions, it is true, “have not eliminated the inevitable partisan suspicions associated with political line-drawing.” Cain, 121 Yale L. J., at
