Supreme Court Says that Pennsylvania Has to Redraw its Congressional Boundaries

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the case in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Congressional Districts in that state had indeed been gerrymandered in a way to favor Republicans over Democrats, and that these boundaries must be redrawn. At the very end I noted that:

Since the case in Pennsylvania relied on the state constitution, not on the U.S. Constitution, Reuters notes that the case could avoid being adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court. We'll see!

Today we saw! The U.S. Supreme Court chose not to take up the case, as NPR reports:

The United States Supreme Court has decided not to block a state court ruling requiring Pennsylvania's Legislature to immediately redraw its legislative boundaries.

Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court had previously ruled those 18 congressional districts — drawn by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Republican governor in 2011 — were overly partisan and violated the state Constitution.

The state's Democratic governor and Republican-controlled Legislature now have until Feb. 15 to draw new lines.

Pennsylvania is a state in which Democrats outnumber Republicans among registered voters, and yet 13 of the 18 state's members of Congress were Republican. Will that change after the new maps are drawn? We'll see!