The Supreme Court's most recent decision addressing whether an issue constituted a political question is
Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the Court held that claims of excessive partisanship in districting are not justiciable.
In
Rucho, legislatures in two states had enacted congressional redistricting plans that were “highly partisan, by any measure.”
The Supreme Court framed the issue before it as “whether there is an ‘appropriate role for the Federal Judiciary’ in remedying the problem of partisan gerrymandering—whether such claims are claims of
legal right, resolvable according to
legal principles, or political questions that must find their resolution elsewhere.”
The Court concluded that partisan gerrymandering claims constitute political questions because they “lack ‘judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving [them].’ ”
The Court explained that “[f]ederal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
The Court emphasized that “ ‘[j]udicial action must be governed by standard, by rule,’ and must be ‘principled, rational, and based upon reasoned distinctions’ found in the Constitution or laws.”
The
Rucho decision strongly indicates that, by contrast, race discrimination and Voting Rights Act claims, like those asserted by the Plaintiffs, do not present political questions.