Colorado General Assembly v. Salazar, Attorney General of Colorado
The Supreme Court declined to hear a dispute over Colorado's congressional map, leaving in place a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that barred the state legislature from replacing a court-drawn map with its own, newly passed redistricting plan.
Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas, dissented from the denial, arguing the Court should have taken up whether treating state courts as part of the 'Legislature' for redistricting purposes conflicts with the Constitution's Elections Clause.
How it got here: The Colorado Supreme Court ruled for the Attorney General and against the legislature's new map; the legislature and Secretary of State asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review that ruling, which it declined to do.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After the 2000 census gave Colorado a new congressional seat, its legislature missed the deadline to redraw districts before the 2002 election, so a state court drew a temporary map. In 2003, the newly elected legislature passed its own redistricting plan, but Colorado's Attorney General sued to block it and force a return to the court-drawn map, which the Colorado Supreme Court ordered kept in place through 2010.
The question before the Court
Could a state supreme court permanently lock in a court-drawn congressional map and bar the state legislature from redrawing it, without running afoul of the federal Constitution's rule that legislatures set election rules?
Why it matters
Colorado's 2002 court-drawn congressional map stayed in effect through the rest of the decade instead of the legislature's 2003 plan, affecting which voters were grouped into which districts. The unresolved question — whether courts can count as part of a state's 'Legislature' for redistricting — remained open for future election-law disputes in other states.
What changes now
Because the Court denied certiorari, the Colorado Supreme Court's decision stands and the case ends without a Supreme Court ruling on the merits. The court-ordered 2002 map remained in place through the 2010 redistricting cycle, and the broader question about whether state courts can count as part of a state's 'Legislature' for congressional redistricting was left open for a future case to resolve.
What this does not decide
The denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits and does not establish that Colorado's approach — or any state court's role in redistricting — is constitutional. It simply means the Supreme Court chose not to review the Colorado Supreme Court's decision at this time.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Rehnquist
“these judicially-created districts are just as binding and permanent as districts created by the General Assembly”Quoting the Colorado Supreme Court's holding that court-drawn districts can permanently displace the legislature's plan.
Chief Justice Rehnquist argued the Court should have granted certiorari to decide whether Colorado's constitution, as interpreted by its own supreme court, improperly counted state courts as part of the 'Legislature' responsible for congressional redistricting under the federal Elections Clause. He contended that unlike prior approved arrangements involving a governor or voter referendum, letting courts permanently lock in a map excluded any body representing the people, raising a serious and unresolved constitutional question.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The dissent focused on the federal Elections Clause, which says election rules 'shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,' and asked whether a state supreme court's construction of state law could define courts themselves as part of that 'Legislature.'
- It looked to Smiley v. Holm, a 1932 case holding that the Elections Clause refers to whatever lawmaking process a state's law actually establishes, not to a fixed body, so long as that process still involves lawmaking through political actors like a governor.
- It also noted Ohio ex rel. Davis v. Hildebrant, which upheld letting voters approve or reject redistricting laws by referendum, as another example of a lawmaking process the Court had found consistent with the Elections Clause.
- The dissent reasoned that both of those approved arrangements still included participation by a body representing the people or the people themselves, whereas Colorado's approach let courts permanently lock in a map with no such participation.
- From this, the dissent concluded there must be some outer limit on a state's power to define 'Legislature' to exclude the elected legislature itself in favor of the courts, and that the Colorado Supreme Court's interpretation raised a serious, unresolved federal question worth the Court's review.