Gerrymandering is, you know, maybe it’s a technical term, but one way to think about it is, you have the party in power trying to rig elections. First up is our major victory on behalf of the rule of law and election integrity in Maryland. Where we challenged on behalf of voters in Maryland the gerrymandered map of congressional districts created by the Democratic legislature there. We had a trial on our challenge. It was a challenge under the Constitution of Maryland and Declaration of Rights. And we won! The court just announced today issued a big ruling here. This is the ruling.

94 pages. Remember random opinion and order in the circuit court for Anne Arundel County, which is the county out west in Maryland. The trial occurred in Annapolis, Maryland, the state capital. We had experts, the other side experts, the state had experts. And there were two challenges, two groups of challengers, and Judicial Watch represented plaintiffs, including a state delegate in Maryland, Neil Parrott and voters in every district in Maryland. And there was another set of plaintiffs who also objected. And the court ruled in our favor, called it an extreme gerrymander that violated the rights of Republicans under the Constitution.

So this is the background on the story. So Larry Hogan, who is a Republican governor of Maryland, had a citizens commission draw up a map that the left didn’t like and Democrats in the state legislature didn’t like. So what happened is they drew up their own map, and they passed it in the legislature without any Republican votes. And the map essentially, and I think we’ll probably pop up the map during the discussion, you’ll see how awful it is, they created a map that essentially would lead to no Republicans being elected in the House of Representatives. And the way you gerrymander maps is you kind of, you jigger the lines in a way to make sure that there are enough members of people who are likely to vote for candidates of your choice.

If you’re a Democrat, you do it the Democrat way. If you’re Republican, you do it the Republican way. And to a certain extent, that’s okay in our political system. But when you cross the line and abuse the rule of law and destroy any sense of normalcy in the political process, where you’ve got these maps that go throughout the state and look like dead birds in the middle of the state and connect, for instance, in western Maryland, one of the key districts is connected by, if you’ve been around Maryland, you’ll know that to get to the eastern shore, which is the beaches and that area of Maryland, you have to cross something called the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which is a tremendous feat of engineering, miles long.

And that’s how they connect the district in Maryland. I mean, it’s like being in another country, practically speaking, the way the districts have been set up from one part of the state to another. A complete abuse, and everyone recognizes it to be a partisan abuse. And the Democrats in the state have decided that no one can do a lot of the challenge yet under the state constitution, and we said we are. And what happened was, as I said, the Democrats passed the map, Hogan vetoed it, they overrode the veto, and so the challenge went forward in the state court in Maryland, and we won.

The court found, and I’m going to read from the court the decision here. This is the decision. It’s well worth reading in a toto. I don’t know how the court got out a 95-page, 94-page decision in less than a week, but she managed to get it out, so I’m sure there are a few typos and such in here. One of the key findings of the court, she writes, The political participation in congressional elections was violated by the 2021 plan. As a result, this court will enter a declaratory judgment in favor of the plaintiffs declaring the 2021 plan unconstitutional and permanently enjoining its operation.

And giving the General Assembly, which is the state legislature of Maryland, an opportunity to develop a new congressional plan that is constitutional. A separate declaratory judgment will be entered. So this is just great. And this judge, by the way, she’s not a Trump appointee. She’s not a Hogan appointee. As far as I can tell, she’s a Democrat. She was appointed by Democrats in Maryland, and she saw right through this that this was an extreme, and she uses the language, extreme gerrymander. And this is one of the worst gerrymanders in the country, and it’s very rare that state gerrymanders such as this or congressional districts such as the congressional district maps such as this are thrown out.

And as best we can tell, certainly in the modern era, I think this is only the fifth time it’s happened. And the left likes to make it seem like, oh, only Republicans engage in partisan gerrymandering, or they usually play the race card, which is usually not true, and suggest the Republicans are racist in how they gerrymander as opposed to just being partisan. But here, the Democrats were caught with their hand in the cookie jar. And gerrymandering is, you know, maybe it’s a technical term, but one way to think about it is you have the party in power trying to rig elections by improperly, in this case, keeping voters in jurisdictions in a way to guarantee certain politicians will be elected.

Mainly politicians of the Democrat Party. And as I said before, there’s nothing wrong with doing that if you’re in power in a modest way. You know, kind of, you know, you’ve got some flexibility, you’re keeping the maps compact and relatively distinct in terms of making sure that there’s no unlawful, where counties and towns and localities are kind of torn apart. For the purposes of redistricting. And you’ve got a little give and take. You keep, you know, some members of your party, you know, you make it work for members of your party. But then there’s an abuse.

And you see that in the Maryland map. And it was so extreme that this Maryland court judge said, you’ve got to go back to the drawing board. So what happens next? It’s a little bit unclear. It looks like they have five days to appeal and they could go straight to the Maryland’s highest court and we’ll see what happens. But I think it’s looking good. And this is one of the most notorious partisan gerrymanders in the country. And it’s no doubt it doesn’t provide fair and effective representation for all citizens. And it violates the Constitution of Maryland.

It’s now official. There’s a court that found that it violated the Constitution of Maryland. And Judicial Watch has been at this game for a long time in terms of trying to get the courts to look at these improper gerrymanders. And to be fair, Republicans do it too. They sometimes engage in abusive partisan gerrymandering. I mean, it’s a temptation, especially if the courts are unwilling to police it, as certainly in this case, the state constitution allows them to do. I mean, in Maryland, for instance, Republicans accounted for 35 percent of congressional votes. But under this map, they wouldn’t have been able, practically speaking, to elect any one representative.

I mean, how is that appropriate? Under the Constitution of Maryland, you know, that requires voters to have a fair chance to participate in our election process. So this isn’t even a federal constitutional fight. This is the state constitution which has these broad protections that seem to prohibit this partisan gerrymandering. Indeed, the court suggested and agreed with us on that. And so we’ve been fighting this for years. Our lead lawyer and our election team, our lead lawyer is Bob Popper. Russ Nobiel was on the team, and Eric Lee of our attorney staff as well. They all worked hard on this, so they deserve great congratulations.

So the wonderful thing about this, the work I do, at least in these updates, is I get to come on and talk about all the other great work my colleagues here do at Judicial Watch. And of course, you know, our clients came forward and did this. And you know what happens when your challenge is left. They come after you. So we’re grateful for our clients coming forward and Delegate Parrott taking some leadership on this as our client. And as I said, it’s not a partisan issue. The Judicial Watch, Bob Popper, who is our lead attorney, he testified, as I told you a few weeks ago, in Florida.

Ron DeSantis, his people knew that Popper was an expert in these areas, and he came down and testified against a gerrymandered district that was racist, but took a whole bunch of black voters and stuck them up in North Florida in an obviously gerrymandered map that went across the state, this top of Florida like this, from Tallahassee, I think, all the way to Jacksonville, as I recall. And you know, Bob pointed out that you can’t do that. You just can’t stick voters in districts based on race in this improper way. And the Republicans wanted to do it.

The Democrats wanted to do it. And DeSantis said, no, we’re not doing it. So this is a Republican fight, and Judicial Watch took the side of, in our view, the rule of law here against the Republicans in the Florida legislature. And they didn’t like that. You believe me, they didn’t like that at all. I can tell you that. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and like our video down below. See you next time. [tr:trw].

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