She added: “It is far too much control for one branch to have another branch, especially when one of its jobs is to rule in the excesses of the legislature.”
If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would be only the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Illinois, to map its judicial system entirely to constituencies, according to the Brennan Center. And other states could soon join Pennsylvania in trying to redesign the courts through redistribution.
Republicans in the Texan legislature, also controlled by the GOP, recently introduced a bill to move districts for the state appeals courts by moving some districts to different districts, causing an uproar among the State Democrats who are the new districts see as a weakening of the vote The power of the black and Latin American communities in judicial elections and possibly the Republican bias of the Texas courts.
Gilberto Hinojosa, leader of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill “a mere takeover to prevent blacks and Latinos from influencing the courts as their numbers in the state grow”.
These judicial restructuring struggles take shape as Republican-controlled lawmakers across the country investigate new election restrictions after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans are looking in the state assembly for a number of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including a drop box ban and extensive postal voting restrictions. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict postal voting, including the state’s ban on sending postal voting requests. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.
The Republican nationwide effort follows a successful four-year initiative by the Party’s Washington lawmakers to reshape federal justice with Conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges and three new Supreme Court justices during the former president’s four-year tenure, according to Russell Wheeler. a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could lead to an oversized representation of sparsely populated places that are more conservative, especially if lawmakers resort to a gerrymandering tactic used in Pennsylvania’s 2011 resembles.
