The future of CD7

Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was in D.C. when she learned the U.S. Supreme Court had upended the legal landscape for congressional redistricting — including how courts view the creation of majority-minority districts.

Her office in D.C. is still littered with many of the awards, photos and hand-drawn scribbles her father, Raúl Grijalva, left behind during his more than two decades in Congress. As luck would have it, her office is the same one her father had before he passed.

But his legacy isn’t limited to keepsakes or his long list of legislative victories in D.C. It includes a generation of Southern Arizona Latinos who say he inspired them to run for political office and now have seats in the statehouse, city councils, and school governing boards.

Now, the Supreme Court decision is forcing Arizona Democrats, voting rights advocates and Latino elected officials to confront questions few expected to ask again: What happens if courts no longer uphold protections for majority-minority districts?

And is Arizona about to lose the next generation of Latino elected officials?

It isn’t clear whether Raúl — then a Pima County Supervisor — would have won in 2002 if the congressional district boundaries hadn’t been written to include the region’s large Latino population.

She thinks the same for Arizona’s other majority-minority district in Phoenix, once home to Congressman Ed Pastor. It is currently represented by Yassamin Ansari.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision is already rippling through the country.

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee just put forward a new U.S. House map that slices up the last Democratic, Black-majority district in the state.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended an ongoing primary election to allow lawmakers to redraw congressional maps, while redistricting discussions in Alabama, South Carolina and Florida got a boost from the SCOTUS decision.

And President Donald Trump wants the Mississippi Legislature to redraw the state’s districts and force out Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the January 6 committee hearings and was a thorn in Trump’s side throughout his first term as president.

Arizona, however, is built differently. The state’s voter-backed Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) is designed to resist partisan, mid-cycle redraws. The commission’s independence also keeps the Legislature at arm’s length.

Still, Senate President Warren Petersen said last week that Republicans plan to challenge Arizona’s congressional maps in an effort to create more GOP-friendly districts. He wants to file the lawsuit in December, after the general election.

Arizona Republican Party Chair Sergio Arellano said the SCOTUS decision was about “restoring trust,” while hinting at support for new maps.

It’s not clear how far Petersen’s effort would get. No lawsuit has been drafted — much less filed — and any challenge would run headlong into the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, which upheld the legality of independent commissions created by voter initiative.

And while redistricting may be en vogue nationally, the Arizona Constitution is pretty explicit: The IRC redraws maps once every 10 years, after the decennial census.

That doesn’t mean a legal fight couldn’t force the issue — but it would take a significant shift in how courts interpret Arizona’s system.

Political consultant DJ Quinlan, who played a role in the IRC’s redistricting efforts in 2010 while working for the Arizona Democratic Party, was disappointed by the SCOTUS decision.

But he isn’t quite convinced that the IRC’s mission — which follows federal law when it draws maps — has changed.

One goal is to make the districts politically competitive, although the IRC has signed off on maps that had “safe” districts for both Republicans and Democrats. Both CD3 and CD7 — which again are majority-minority districts — were considered safe districts for Democrats.

Other factors going into the IRC’s decision-making include discouraging splitting up cities, towns and counties and other political subdivisions, and keeping “communities of interests” in the same district.

Quinlan says trying to carve up CD7 to make it more politically competitive — or to benefit Republicans outright — might be a heavy lift.

In other words, with the new SCOTUS decision, how can you split up the greater Tucson area into two or three Republican-leaning districts? It might not be possible given IRC’s other mandates.

So what will the next iteration of the IRC-approved maps look like? It is hard to tell, but what they are doing in Tennessee right now is unlikely to happen here.