HARRISBURG, Pa.– On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States denied a second request filed by House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati for a stay on new congressional maps drawn by the PA Supreme Court. The federal court ruled that they did not have the legal authority to intervene based on the record before them.
“The federal Republican judges who heard the appeals of our Pennsylvania state lawmakers practiced the restraint typical of Republican judges. Unfortunately, this will now allow one of the most activist decisions in the history of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, passed down by a majority Democrat court, to stand.
“As was asserted in the amicus that we filed in support of our Pennsylvania lawmakers’ second appeal, the result of this will be a compromise in the integrity of upcoming congressional elections through both the creation of confusion among residents regarding which district they live, as well as candidates no longer being in districts in which they had been already campaigning for months.
“As there is nothing in either the Pennsylvania Constitution or the United States Constitution that would infer the court’s power to draw congressional maps under any circumstance, It also sets up a dangerous precedent for allowing an unconstitutional seizure of power by the judicial branch. If the courts found the original maps, passed by a bi-partisan legislature and signed by a governor to be unconstitutional, then the task of redrawing them should have afforded the legislature an opportunity to do so through a standard legislative process. The original time constraint issued by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to the legislature, was an intentional move to ensure they would ultimately be the ones to draw new maps.
“The Pennsylvania Republican Party reaffirms that the actions taken by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court were nothing more than judicial-mandering by Democratic Party operatives in robes,” said Val DiGiorgio, Chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania.
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