Supreme Court Declines to Hear Challenge to Pennsylvania Electoral Map

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a former GOP congressman’s challenge to a map of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House of Representatives districts adopted by the commonwealth’s Democrat-majority high court.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled in February 2022 to use a U.S. House district map that was more favorable to Democrats than the maps that were drawn up by the Republican-controlled state legislature. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Pennsylvania Supreme Court map to remain in effect for the 2022 elections.

Pennsylvania currently has 17 U.S. House districts, down one district after the state lost population in the 2020 census.

An appeal of the state Supreme Court’s February ruling was brought by former Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.), who argued that the U.S. Constitution limits the ability of state courts to interfere with maps or rules adopted by state legislatures for federal elections.

Costello, who served in the House from 2015 to 2019, asked that the Supreme Court take up the case alongside a similar one out of North Carolina it agreed in June to hear to “rein in the state judiciaries’ unconstitutional meddling in congressional redistricting decisions.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed the map created by the Republican-controlled legislature, and claimed it was the result of a “partisan political process.”

The North Carolina case, like the Pennsylvania one, involves a map drawn by a Republican-led legislature that a state high court rejected in favor of a different, judicially endorsed redistricting plan.

‘We Will Have to Resolve This Question’

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh wrote in March that the high court should move to decide whether state courts improperly took powers away from state lawmakers. But the court ultimately denied the Republican-led redistricting pleas in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

“We will have to resolve this