Attorney General Derek Schmidt has filed legal action to block state-level lawsuits challenging the state’s redistricting map, requesting that the courts hold that legal challenges can’t be brought in state courts and to dismiss two district-court lawsuits already filed in Wyandotte Co.
“For the first time in Kansas history, lawsuits have been filed in state court asking a state district court judge to hold that redistricting legislation for federal congressional maps violates the Kansas Constitution,” Schmidt said via press release. “There is a good reason these lawsuits find no support in precedent: Neither the federal nor the Kansas Constitution authorizes state courts to pass on the validity of federal congressional maps, and certainly not under the legal theories the Plaintiffs in the recently filed cases advance.”
Schmidt instead wants to see the issue taken directly to the Kansas Supreme Court, requesting the court to rule that there are no constitutional laws keeping political bias out of the map-making process.
“The Elections Clause [of the U.S. Constitution] commits the redistricting power to state legislatures, and no Kansas law—either statutory or constitutional—gives the state courts any role in evaluating the validity of duly enacted redistricting plans,” Schmidt added. “Plaintiffs’ political gerrymandering claim is not justiciable under the Kansas Constitution. No judicially manageable standard for evaluating such claims exists, Kansas courts have not historically entertained such claims, and the Kansas Constitution has nothing at all to say about political gerrymandering.”
You can read Schmidt’s full petition here.
