Topeka ? It wasn’t surprising when three federal judges moved quickly to uphold the state’s new congressional districts and declared that communities of interest could be split up.

Legal precedents had suggested Atty. Gen. Carla Stovall’s challenge would fail. Then, the judges dropped strong hints from the bench they would defer to the Legislature’s judgment on key issues in the case.

Stovall filed the lawsuit at the request of Junction City residents upset over how the law put their community in the 1st District, separating it from neighboring Fort Riley. The fort remained in the 2nd District, with most of eastern Kansas.

The judges concluded that how Junction City and Fort Riley were treated, along with other communities like Lawrence, was a political question best left to elected officials.

The four districts were redrawn to reflect population shifts based on the 2000 census. The court’s first concern was whether the new districts were as nearly equal in population as possible.

In determining the communities-of-interest issue to be political, the judges rejected the heart of Stovall’s case.

The Lawrence impact

Stovall argued the congressional map was unconstitutional because of how it separated Junction City and Fort Riley. The two have formed a long-standing community of interest, she said.

Lawrence’s situation weakened her case even more.

Legislators split the city between the 2nd District and the 3rd, rather than keeping the city whole in the 3rd, connected with the Kansas portion of the Kansas City metropolitan area.

When the judges asked Assistant Atty. Gen. Scott Hesse why Stovall didn’t also raise the Lawrence split as an issue, he said no one from Lawrence asked Stovall’s office to do so.

The Senate Democratic leader’s office did intervene to protest the split of Lawrence. It favored a plan that split Johnson County along the southern borders of its cities.

But the idea of splitting Johnson County weakened minority Democrats’ arguments that Lawrence couldn’t be split.

Bob Eye, the attorney arguing the Democratic view, told the judges that Johnson County was more diverse than it might seem, becoming rural south of the boundary line proposed by Democrats.

Done in by precedent

Chief Judge Deanell Tacha of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a Lawrence resident presiding over the lawsuit, shot back from the bench: “You should be careful with those arguments. Lawrence has some of those same diversities.”

However, both Stovall’s case and Democrats’ arguments to keep Lawrence whole already had been undercut by precedents.

One sign that the judges went into Tuesday’s hearing having studied past U.S. Supreme Court rulings was the swiftness of their decision, released the next day.

In evaluating whether the Legislature could split communities of interest, the judges cited a 1973 Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case.

In that ruling, the justices declared federal courts should “honor” state policies on congressional redistricting whenever those policies do not conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

If a court must fashion a new plan, or choose among alternative plans, it should not “intrude upon state policy any more than necessary.”

The judges also cited similar language from another decision in a lawsuit over the 1992 Kansas congressional redistricting law. That case also contained another precedent against the idea that communities of interest could not be split.

Earlier Douglas County split

That year, the court was confronted with a map that split no counties, but concluded the population differences among districts were too great.

It chopped the northwest corner of Douglas County from the 3rd District, then split the small town of Peabody between the 1st and the 4th, putting four square blocks and two dozen of its 1,400 residents in the 1st District.

In the 1992 ruling, the court declared it wanted to change the Legislature’s plan as little as possible because deference to the political process was “an important linchpin of judicial review.” Changes were made only to make districts more equal in population.

In this year’s ruling, the judges acknowledged that preserving communities of interest is a legitimate goal for legislators.

“However,” they added, “the fact that this is a legitimate goal does not mean that there is an individual constitutional right to have one’s particular community of interest contained within one congressional district.”