Andres Kudacki/AP

A man shops at a supermarket on July 27, 2022, in New York. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a point for a second straight month in a drive to tame high inflation. The Fed is tightening credit even while the economy has begun to slow, thereby heightening the risk of a recession later this year or next.

The U.S. economy in 2022 is not the best of times or the worst of times. It’s sailed instead into a weird patch of ocean, roiled by the deep waters of the pandemic and the gales of war. 

Several telltale signs of economic activity have shifted in recent months and now point to a slowdown. On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that gross domestic product, a measure of the nation’s output, shrank for the second quarter in a row. In the popular mind, at least, that qualifies as a recession.

But other telltales of the economy look a lot more like the final leg of a strong expansion. Inflation is high; unemployment is near record lows. So perhaps the economic ship isn’t actually in a recession; it’s just starting the turn to head toward one.

The bright side of all this is that even if a recession happens, it’s likely to be a shallow one, many economists say. Even better: Tested by the short but sharp pandemic-driven recession in 2020, many businesses are feeling resilient. The not-so-bright side is that this period might feel like a recession, even if it isn’t one, technically.

“The economy is still growing, but it’s growing so slowly that employment is weak and the unemployment rate is rising and it feels pretty bad,” says Joel Prakken, chief U.S. economist at research firm IHS Markit. He calls it a “growth recession” and says we’re probably already in its early stages. 

His firm forecasts barely positive growth for this quarter (0.8%) and much of the same through 2023. (In the first quarter of this year, by contrast, GDP adjusted for inflation fell 1.6% and declined 0.9% in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.) 

SOURCE:

Bureau of Economic Analysis; National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dating Committee

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Recessions are anomalies, interruptions in the currents of increasing prosperity. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been growing more than 85% of the time. Many economists see recessions as unfortunate overreactions at the troughs of business cycles. Edward Leamer, an economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, calls them pathologies, which wouldn’t have to happen if the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, did a better job managing the economy.

A different economic cycle, from energy to housing

One thing everyone can agree on: This particular cycle is especially hard to gauge because of the lingering effects of the pandemic and new uncertainties about energy and food supplies because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Take energy. Oil prices surged when Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv. But for the second month in a row, they’ve been falling. Motorists now pay an average $4.28 for a gallon of regular gas, according to AAA, still high compared with a year ago, but lower than the peak of $5.02 in mid-June. 

Normally, falling energy prices point to a recession. Ditto for commodities like copper, iron ore, lumber, and cotton, which are also experiencing a price decline. But this time the ups and downs of energy prices have far more to do with shifts in supply than in demand. Much of the West is refusing to buy Russian oil, and it’s taking time for world markets to adjust oil flows to bring the market back into balance.

Housing is another head-scratcher. Sales of new single-family homes, which were rising last year when Americans were desperate to buy before mortgage rates went up, have now fallen to a two-year low. Normally, such declines signal a recession after a period of frenzied activity by lenders and builders. But this time is different.

“We haven’t had the excessive lending and excessive building that’s characteristic of the other expansions,” says Mr. Leamer of Anderson Forecast. “So that makes me think that, if we have a recession, it’s not going to be a very deep one ... because we don’t have the fragile housing market. We need more homes, certainly in California!”

Or consider the car market. Year-over-year sales have been falling for a year, but the problem isn’t demand, which remains strong. It’s supply – a lingering shortage of semiconductors brought on by pandemic-related factory closures.

An unusual labor market, too

Another common telltale is employment. Companies from Peleton and Re/Max to Netflix, Shopify, video-hosting firm Vimeo, and even Tesla have already cut back their workforces. Crunchbase News estimates some 30,000 tech workers have lost their jobs so far this year.

Layoffs normally signal a recession, except in this cycle, the U.S. is still adding jobs overall, not subtracting them. The unemployment rate is near lows not seen since 1969. And for every worker available to take a new job, there are 1.9 positions open, according to the latest government data – also near record highs.

Julia Nikhinson/AP

People walk past the Nasdaq MarketSite on July 13, 2022, in New York. Companies hit the brakes on deal-making during the first half of 2022 as concerns over pervasive inflation, interest rate hikes, and the threat of a recession loomed. Companies globally announced $2.2 trillion worth of buyout deals in the first half, a 21% drop from a year earlier.

Such strong job growth typically signals the late stages of an expansion. But this time the labor shortage is due, at least in part, to the reluctance of many workers to return to work after the pandemic. The pandemic has interfered so much with employment that Mr. Leamer has for now dropped it as an indicator for forecasting recession.

Tight labor markets also play a role in inflation. If energy and commodity prices continue to fall, then the key to future inflation will be what kind of pay raises workers demand. In a recent survey of small businesses, nearly half were planning to take out a line of credit this year. Of those, a quarter were preparing to use the debt to raise existing employee salaries, according to Kabbage, an American Express data and technology company offering funding for small business.

Tough moment for the Fed

In the 1970s and early ’80s, the only way the Federal Reserve found to crush inflation was to trigger a recession. That caused unemployment to go up and tempered workers’ wage demands. With inflation again approaching those double-digit levels, the central bank on Wednesday hiked short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, after an identical hefty increase in June.  

All the Fed has to do this time is raise unemployment by about half a percentage point from today’s low 3.6% rate, says Mr. Prakken of IHS Markit. That would do very little damage to the economy and achieve what economists call a “soft landing,” he adds. “But here’s the rub. Even if it only will take an increase in the unemployment rate back up to 4.1% to quell inflation, the historical experience since World War II is that the unemployment rate has never risen by just that amount without actually rising a lot more than that and slipping into recession.”

There’s plenty of skepticism the Fed can engineer a soft landing. In a new study, Mr. Leamer found that the best predictor of recession is the yield curve – the difference between short-term and long-term interest rates. When the Fed boosts short-term rates and banks won’t offer investors a higher rate for holding their money for longer periods of time, it’s a sign that lenders are skittish about the future. He says it’s not clear the Fed is overly worried about such curve “flattening.”  

Slightly more than half of consumers believe the U.S. is already in a recession, according to a NielsenIQ report last month. In a new Kabbage survey released this month, more than 4 in 5 small businesses worried about a potential U.S. economic recession.

At the same time, 80% of the firms said they were confident they could withstand it. Their top reason for optimism? The pandemic. “It helped them find a greater sense of resilience and preparedness to be successful in the future despite economic turbulence,” writes Brett Sussman, Kabbage’s chief marketing officer, in an email.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Oles Yakymchuk was in Ohio, studying for a master’s degree in fine arts. He did not have to come back to his homeland. The war was an ocean away.

But Mr. Yakymchuk, who’s spent the last four months raising money and delivering first-aid supplies, couldn’t tolerate the distance. “I didn’t know how I could live a normal life in the U.S. during all this crazy stuff happening here,” he says. “I would have to come back.”

So he did – in part to support his family, in part because he couldn’t ignore his feelings for his country. Mr. Yakymchuk is 29, almost the same age as modern Ukraine, which was founded in August 1991. He and the country have grown up together, through independence, economic depression, democratic revolution, and now war. Those events have both profoundly influenced his life and made him want to influence the life of his country.

In Ukraine, Mr. Yakymchuk’s generation is known for its activism, its European ideals, and its patriotism. Young people protested for democracy during the 2013-14 Maidan revolution and the Orange Revolution 10 years before it.

Now, young people are among the most involved in Ukraine’s war effort – gathering aid or fighting on the front lines.

Their work shows a powerful sense of agency. When faced with threats to their country, Ukraine’s post-independence generation often feels like it can, and must, do something. It’s a foil to the political pessimism elsewhere, particularly in the United States, where young people often feel the least enabled to act.

During wartime, though, there’s a cost to being a generation that tries. Last month in Kyiv, hundreds of people attended the funeral of Roman Ratushny, a young activist who had volunteered to fight on the first day of the war. Elsewhere in the country, many have begun to worry that this generation will also face some of the war’s worst consequences.

“This war is our war, and this is our responsibility,” says Mr. Yakymchuk.

Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters

Students sit inside a bomb shelter at a military school as they conduct air-raid alarm training as Russia's war in Ukraine continues, in Kyiv, Ukraine, July 27, 2022.

“They’re the bravest”

Mr. Yakymchuk has been an activist before, including during the Maidan revolution. So when he returned to Kyiv this March, he reconnected with several friends with a similar background. They wanted to do something to help the war effort, and decided to collect first-aid supplies. Within a few weeks, Mr. Yakymchuk had opened a bank account and posted a donation page online. Within a month, while walking to get coffee one morning, he checked the account. He had a $30,000 balance.

He and his friends have bought and delivered, sometimes near actual fighting, thousands of first-aid kits and tourniquets. In the process, Mr. Yakymchuk’s number was passed on the front lines from person to person, who would then call and request equipment. Eventually his group registered as an official nongovernmental organization, UA First Aid, but only after months of work without weekends and relying on savings to pay rent and other essentials.

“My way of fighting stress is to act,” says Mr. Yakymchuk, speaking to the Monitor at a Kyiv pizza joint.

Still, it sometimes nags him that he didn’t enlist. It’s been difficult to try to meet the needs of his country when those needs are so great. “I don’t want to do this job, actually,” he says. “I’m doing it just because they need this.”

Inga Levy, an artist in her mid-30s from Kyiv who is now living in Lithuania, says people their age feel like Ukraine’s needs have to be met.

Ms. Levy was born into the USSR, but she wasn’t raised in it. “The world became more open; we saw different countries; we could travel; we got more information,” she says of her generation.

Growing up in such an environment, and watching the country mature after the Maidan revolution, gave her a sense of optimism about the country that her parents don’t share. Because of that hope, she got involved before the war in cultural preservation around her city – helping save murals and other works of art from development. “If not me,” she says, “then no one [will do it].”

The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP

People mourn and lay a bouquet of flowers for Roman Ratushny, a Ukrainian soldier who died in the battle in eastern Ukraine against Russian troops, at Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 18, 2022.

She senses now a similar kind of motivation from other people her age or younger. At once, it’s encouraging and defeating. She’s already lost multiple friends.

“These young people who volunteer, going to the front line – they’re the bravest,” says Ms. Levy, who accepted a residency in Lithuania during the war. “I know that not only they are dying, but these are the most painful losses.”

“We can do something”

During Soviet rule, such losses might not have been acceptable, says Ivan Nikolenko, a 27-year-old anti-corruption activist who’s become a full-time first-aid instructor during the war.

Mr. Nikolenko was born in the eastern city of Dnipro, home to an enormous rocket plant first built by the Soviet Union. There, he grew up believing that Ukraine was almost a lost cause and that European integration was an error. Even now, he says, his parents are somewhat pro-Russian.

He understands why: They grew up in the Soviet Union surrounded by Soviet propaganda. Ukrainians at that time weren’t permitted the freedom or amount of information that younger generations enjoy today. They have this ​​”disbelief in the country, in the people – the disbelief in general that someone could wish better for them,” says Mr. Nikolenko.

“The major difference between us, like 20- or 30-, and 50- or 60-year-old people is the thing that we believe: that we can do something,” he says.

The same belief leads Kyril Bezkorovainy, 27, to write.

In 2014, after fighting began in the Donbas region, Mr. Bezkorovainy and his friends noticed that major print publications were leaving Ukraine. So he and his friends started one of their own. They focused on science writing, and made some mistakes, but have since grown into multiple magazines, podcasts, and websites.

Since the war, they’ve begun publishing about first aid, evasive maneuvers, water purification, and other survival skills. Their work has become a how-to guide for civilians surviving a war. That’s what he wants for his country: survival.

“All important stages of my life are somehow tied with these ... crucial stages for sovereignty, for democracy for our country,” says Mr. Bezkorovainy. “We are going through those challenges together with Ukraine.”

And they all will make it through, says Mr. Yakymchuk, sitting in the pizza kitchen in Kyiv next to a map of the country. Sometimes he finds old daily schedules from his time in Ohio, and still feels shocked at how different life was, just going to classes and playing music. But he doesn’t just want an easy life elsewhere.

“I want to make my own paradise,” he says, and he wants it to be in Ukraine.

Olya Bystritskaya supported reporting for this story.

Rosa Idalia Chicas remembers her fear growing up in El Salvador during the civil war. The military could show up and take away a loved one at any moment and without explanation – sometimes forever. Even though the conflict ended 30 years ago, lately her community has felt similarly on edge.

In March, following one of the deadliest days in El Salvador since the civil war, President Nayib Bukele’s government declared a state of emergency to crack down on local gangs that have taken control of entire swaths of the country. It has been extended four times, currently in effect through August, and it restricts freedom of assembly, access to legal representation and due process, and allows the government to make indiscriminate arrests.  

More than 45,000 Salvadorans have been detained, according to the Security Ministry. Rights groups say many have no gang ties and were arrested without their families having any knowledge of their well-being.

The arrests have hit Ms. Chicas’ community in eastern El Salvador hard, pitting neighbors against one another. Gang activity has been present here for decades, and no one wants to be mistaken as a sympathizer. Ever since her brother, Julio Cesar Chicas, was arrested at his home in May, even her extended family has kept its distance. He has never been involved with a gang, she says, but those who are still speaking with her only do so cautiously, out of fear of association.

The community divisions that are emerging are a red flag to civil war-era organizations that dedicated the past three decades to conflict resolution. Several have jumped into action first to unite families of the wrongfully detained and then to help them denounce the state of emergency and counter some of the stigmas tearing the community fabric at its seams.

Elipe Mahé

Cristosal, an NGO that works with victims of violence in El Salvador, has supported families from the region Bajo Lempa to demand the release of family members detained under the state of emergency.

Gossip and “hatred within the population” has grown hand-in-hand with the state of emergency over the past several months, says José Salvador Ruiz, a leader of Comunidades Eclesiales de Base, a grassroots organization that worked with survivors of a 1981 massacre here.

It propelled him and others to help families like Ms. Chicas’ petition the government for information on their loved ones and to put a public face on the fear many are suffering silently following the arrests.

Life has become “worse than during the war, because we distrust even our neighbors,” Ms. Chicas says of the past four months. Yet for those coming together to speak out against the detentions, these families are showing others that as a united front they can better fight for their rights. “We are their voice,” she says.

Worse than war

It’s no coincidence that it’s communities from this region, known as the Bajo Lempa, that united to take action: They’ve suffered outsized violence at the hands of the government before. Between 1980 and 1992, families here were regularly harassed by the armed forces, and soldiers killed some 500 unarmed civilians in the La Quesera massacre in 1981.

The 1992 peace accords limited the role of the armed forces to national defense and created a new civilian police force meant to be professional and apolitical. But “the police never had a squeaky-clean record,” says Rina Montti, director of human rights research at Cristosal, a nongovernmental organization that works with victims of violence. Security forces have been implicated in serious abuses in recent years, from extrajudicial killings to sexual assaults and forced disappearances. Some 64% of Salvadorans have little or no trust in the police, according to a 2017 poll.

The arrests under the state of emergency are most common in poorer areas, long stigmatized as gang hotspots where police harassment was already systematic, according to Cristosal. “Our territory has been overwhelmed by gangs for years,” Mr. Ruiz says. “But, we have to look at the root of what makes young people join these groups. Our communities fled the war, were repatriated, and then dealt with ... a state that never invested in youth, education, health, or decent housing,” he says.

Elipe Mahé

Neighbors in the region of Bajo Lempa in El Salvador who have family members detained under the country's state of emergency gathered in May to share their experiences and discuss ways to mobilize.

Mr. Bukele has made a name for himself as a social media-savvy leader, at one point describing himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” in his Twitter bio. He has previously pushed the limits on democracy, using his growing power and alliances to stack the Supreme Court with allies, and in his response to the pandemic, which raised concerns about an iron-fisted approach to keeping order.

In a June speech marking his third year in office, he called for support for the “battle” he’s waging via the state of emergency: “This is a war between all honest Salvadorans against the criminals who have kept us in fear, mourning, and misery for years,” Mr. Bukele said.

But imprisoning all gang members would hardly resolve violence in El Salvador, experts say. “There’s a structure of organized crime that’s been fostered for decades, and it is not going to disappear so easily,” says Verónica Reyna, director of human rights at Social Service Pasionista.

Portraying government detractors as associates or supporters of gangs is part of the administration’s divisive approach under the state of emergency, rights workers say.

Esmeralda Domínguez of Bajo Lempa was arrested on April 19. A community leader active in women’s rights and environmental organizations, she was targeted after trying to get her husband released after his arbitrary arrest earlier that month, says her mother María Dolores García, who is a survivor of the La Quesera massacre. Now family and friends have shunned the family.  

Another 60 people – including farmers, construction workers, and tortilla sellers – have been detained in the Bajo Lempa region and their families similarly ostracized.

Elipe Mahé

Images of late Salvadoran priest Oscar Romero hang inside La Noria Chapel. He is famous for his preaching in defense of human rights and was very active in the community of Bajo Lempa during the country's civil war.

“United we will free each case”

This was the stigma Comunidades Eclesiales de Base hoped to confront. They organized meetings with the families of detainees, creating a space to share their uncertainties and pain.

A strategy for action emerged from that initial sense of unity. Family members composed a song called “Hasta darles el abrazo” (Until we embrace them), which tells the story of arbitrary arrests – including their frustration with the state for refusing to share information about a loved one’s whereabouts or the humiliation they’ve felt at the hand of government institutions. But, in the song, the family is motivated to keep fighting, “reunited and united we will free each case,” reads one refrain.

As confidence and trust grew, the group tried something even more radical: Some 65 neighbors traveled to the Supreme Court of Justice in San Salvador twice in May to file more than 30 habeas corpus petitions in defense of their loved ones. This legal measure is used to bring detainees before the court to determine if their imprisonment is lawful, and the collective filing is the first of its kind during the state of emergency.

They signed an open letter as the Committee of Relatives of Victims of the State of Emergency and read it before entering the court. “Do not be afraid, you are not alone. Get organized and demand respect for your rights,” the statement urged.

That message was received by loved ones of the wrongfully detained in other parts of the country. Groups in at least two other departments have contacted Mr. Ruiz for guidance on demanding answers from the government. “It takes some courage to get involved,” he says.

This experience underscores the importance civil war-era organizations still hold, says Jorge Cuéllar, assistant professor of Latin American studies at Dartmouth College. The trust and the connections they’ve maintained with the community puts them in a unique position to mobilize members.

“This bond needs to be reactivated and reoriented toward” today’s struggles around upholding human rights, he says.

Even though the state of emergency enjoys broad support – 74% in one poll – that breaks down when respondents are questioned about the suspensions of each right specifically.

President Bukele’s political strategy is to maintain a constant crisis that requires extraordinary measures, says Ms. Reyna. “The population eventually gives up its rights to attend to the emergency,” she says.

The lack of transparency and the way in which the government is flaunting its arrests is giving rise to further polarization. “You cannot continue to build a society that rejoices because others suffer,” says Mr. Ruiz.

Ms. Chicas’ brother and her neighbors’ loved ones are still in jail. The judicial authorities have not responded to their petitions. Still, these families are plotting their next steps.

“We should take to the streets, 500,000, 2 million people to demonstrate, to defend their rights,” says Manuel de Jesús Martínez, whose son Elías, the goalkeeper for his local soccer team, was arrested on March 26. His detention was prior to the announcement of the state of emergency, yet he received the same treatment – no explanation for his arrest or access to legal aid.

“As fathers and mothers we categorically reject the unjust incrimination of our children,” Mr. de Jesús Martínez says. “We know, and the community knows, that they are innocent.”

Julie Carr Smyth/AP/File

Members of the Ohio Senate Government Oversight Committee hear testimony on one of the new maps of state legislative districts on Nov. 16, 2021, at the Statehouse in Columbus. Next week's primary election will use maps that Ohio’s highest court ruled unconstitutional.

For the second time this year, voters in Ohio next week will head to the polls. And just as in May, when the state held its congressional primaries, it will be using maps – this time for the state legislature – that Ohio’s highest court struck down as unconstitutional.

If that sounds like an anomaly, it’s not. Two other states, Alabama and Louisiana, are also using maps this year that courts had found to violate the rights of voters.

It’s all part of the once-a-decade battle over redrawing political boundaries to reflect shifts in population within and between states. Often an exercise in raw power, the redistricting process is frequently manipulated by both parties to try to gain more seats. In a closely divided House of Representatives, any extra edge from diluting the other side’s votes could be enough to flip control.

In recent years, reform advocates in some states have used ballot initiatives and lawsuits to try to curb the power of politicians to produce partisan maps. Other states have turned to independent commissions to draw fairer district lines. But in many red and blue states, redistricting is still employed for political gain, which is one reason why the vast majority of U.S. House seats today are uncompetitive.

Of the states where the redistricting process has devolved into chaos this year, Republican-run Ohio stands out for its legal labyrinths and political hardball, as well as the dashed hopes of reformers. It also underlines the limits of state courts in trying to settle disputes over gerrymanders when politicians refuse to give ground.

Last week, Ohio’s Supreme Court again rejected its congressional map as unconstitutional. Yet the state’s congressional primaries have already been held and the districts can’t be changed before the next election in 2024 – essentially rewarding the politicians who ran down the clock.

The same goes for the statehouse map that is being used next week. It was deemed by the state court to unfairly advantage Republicans, who already hold a three-quarters majority in the state assembly, far more than the overall partisan lean in Ohio. And as reformers point out, unchecked control of state government is what allows politicians to gerrymander maps – making it feel like a game of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” 

“Redistricting is the most powerful process we have when it comes to who holds power,” says Jeniece Brock, policy and advocacy director for Ohio Organizing Collaborative, one of the plaintiffs in the litigation. “When I look at that [state legislature] map, I don’t see a true representation of Ohioans and their voter preferences.”

Amendment banning gerrymandering

In 2015, Ohio voters approved a ballot initiative to create a bipartisan redistricting commission. A subsequent amendment to the state constitution mandated that districts should not be redrawn for partisan gain.

Julie Carr Smyth/AP/File

Testimony about a new map of state legislative districts is presented at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Nov. 16, 2021. Although all maps have been deemed unconstitutional by Ohio's highest court, a federal district court ruled that using one of the rejected maps was “the least flawed option" for voting in 2022.

So when Republicans on the redistricting commission adopted what seemed to be a set of partisan maps based on the 2020 census, reformers sued in state court. 

The venue made sense: In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that partisan gerrymanders may be undemocratic but that federal courts couldn’t adjudicate them, putting the onus on state courts to apply standards of fairness under state law.

In January, Ohio’s Supreme Court struck down both the federal and state maps as unconstitutional and ordered the commission to draw new ones that better reflected Ohio’s partisan balance. In both landmark rulings, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, was the swing vote. 

The court noted that Republicans average an 8-point advantage in statewide elections. But the proposed maps would have yielded more lopsided GOP majorities.

Republicans contend that it’s virtually impossible to draw districts that reflect the state’s partisan balance – 54% to 46% – due to the sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into rural ones. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, defended Ohio’s maps as keeping communities together in right-sized districts, calling the congressional map “fair, compact, and competitive.” 

After its maps were invalidated, Ohio’s redistricting commission struggled to find a path forward. Over the complaints of Democrats on the seven-person commission, Republicans submitted four more sets of state legislative maps, all of which were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court.

“They basically decided to dig in and go for broke,” says Jonathan Entin, a professor emeritus of law at Case Western Reserve University. “They took maximal positions at every stage of the process.” 

Doug Spencer, an associate law professor at the University of Colorado who studies redistricting, says Ohio faced “a state level constitutional crisis,” as a result of these hardball tactics. Ohio’s Supreme Court seemed to have no remedy, since it lacked the authority to impose alternative maps. And it was reluctant to hold the redistricting commission’s GOP members, who included Governor DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, in contempt for ignoring its rulings.

Two states, two very different outcomes

The contrast with New York is instructive. After Democrats there produced an aggressive gerrymander, ignoring a constitutional ban on the practice, the state’s highest court struck down the maps and outsourced the whole process to an independent mapmaker in April. That provided a way forward after Democrats had run roughshod over a similar bipartisan commission, to the frustration of Republicans who are in the minority.

Vaughn Golden/WSKG/AP/File

Judge Patrick McAllister listens to arguments during a hearing on March, 31, 2022, in Bath, New York. The court ruled that New York's new congressional and legislative district maps were illegally gerrymandered to benefit Democrats and outsourced the redistricting process to an independent mapmaker.

In Ohio, the standoff between the state Supreme Court and the legislature was broken after a conservative activist sued in federal court to force the state to hold a primary. In a 2-1 verdict, a federal district court ruled that Ohio must use one of the rejected statehouse maps if the commission failed to produce an acceptable one, calling it “the least flawed option to vindicate the fundamental right to vote” in 2022. (The federal maps weren’t affected by the ruling.)

“As of today, no map exists, uncertainty persists, and nothing ensures that a state-legislative election will happen at all. This court’s intervention, however, can restore a lawful and orderly election by ensuring Ohio voters, candidates, and officials know the districts that will apply,” it wrote. 

Legal experts expressed surprise that Ohio’s highest court had been overruled. “It’s really unusual for a federal court to say we will essentially ignore the state Supreme Court’s interpretation of state law,” says Professor Entin. The ruling also seemed to benefit the politicians who had repeatedly defied the state court, he adds. 

In a dissenting opinion, one of the judges echoed this complaint. Judge Algenon Marbley argued Ohio’s Republican politicians had relied on the court “to rescue their unlawful redistricting plan once they had manufactured a sufficient emergency.”

Judge Marbley was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton. The two judges who wrote the majority opinion were both appointees of President Donald Trump. 

“The optics are terrible,” says Mark Brown, who teaches constitutional law at Capital University Law School in Columbus and filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in the redistricting lawsuit. “It looks like the federal court lining up along partisan lines.” 

For the invalidated maps adopted in Alabama and Louisiana, the same could be said of the U.S. Supreme Court, which stayed the verdicts of federal courts that had found the redistricting processes had violated the constitutional rights of Black voters in both states.

The Supreme Court also recently agreed to hear a claim by Republicans in North Carolina that their state’s judiciary had no right to strike down its congressional maps, arguing the legislature should have the final word. If upheld, that argument could undo all the efforts of reformers to prevent self-interested politicians from drawing boundaries for their own seats. A ruling is expected next year.

Politics and the courts

The next round in Ohio’s redistricting wars could be determined as much by politics as law. 

Chief Justice O’Connor is due to retire this year, opening up the top seat on Ohio’s Supreme Court. One of the candidates vying for the elected position is Justice Sharon Kennedy, a Republican, who dissented in the redistricting rulings, arguing that the court didn’t have the authority to strike down the maps. 

A victory for Justice Kennedy in November’s midterms would leave a vacancy on the court that Governor DeWine could then fill with an interim judge before the next election. That could embolden Republicans on the redistricting commission to tilt the next set of maps in their favor in expectation of a more conciliatory court review. 

“I suspect that the Republicans, with their gerrymandered districts, will win a supermajority in the general assembly and will be in a situation to do it [gerrymandering] again next time. Why would they do anything different?” asks Professor Brown. 

Even if Ohio were to adopt fairer electoral maps, its Statehouse would almost certainly still be Republican-run, given the statewide partisan lean and distribution of voters. But Republican lawmakers from more competitive districts might, in theory at least, want to reach across the aisle on certain issues.

But that’s unlikely as long as Republicans know they won’t face any meaningful opposition at election time because of how the maps are drawn. “They live in districts they could never lose,” says David Pepper, a former Democratic state chairman. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Olly Sholotan sits on knoll at Bruce's Beach, a seafront parcel on Manhattan Beach that was taken from Black owners nearly a century ago under eminent domain laws. Last week Los Angeles County formally gave it back to the Bruce family.

The International Monetary Fund projects that the wealth gap between white and Black people will cost the U.S. economy between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in lost consumption and investment during the 10-year span ending in 2028.

That offers one measure of the persistent disparities arising from a long history of structural discrimination in the U.S. economy. Yesterday the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged that harm. It reached a $24 million settlement with a Philadelphia mortgage company accused of deliberately denying credit to Black and Latino families. It is the second-largest “redlining” case in the agency’s history. The agreement requires Trident Mortgage Co. to invest $20 million in new housing loans in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

“Trident’s unlawful redlining activity denied communities of color equal access to residential mortgages, stripped them of the opportunity to build wealth, and devalued properties in their neighborhoods,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

That settlement followed another landmark restitution. Last week Los Angeles County formally handed back a 3-acre beachfront parcel seized under eminent domain laws from a Black family nearly a century ago. The property is estimated to be worth $20 million today.

“It is never too late to right a wrong,” said County Supervisor Janice Hahn. “We have set the precedent, and it is the pursuit of justice.”

These two cases won’t be easy to replicate (the return of the beach property to the Bruce family required a lengthy legislative and legal process). But they reflect how a widening acknowledgment of the systemic causes of economic inequality is resulting in an earnest pursuit of reconciliation and redress.

In January, 143 mayors signed a Compact on Racial Equity, dedicating themselves – as Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, Texas, put it – to “being held accountable for specific action in [our] communities to advance racial justice.” Across the United States, nearly 250 cities and counties have declared racism a public health crisis.

“There are, of course, moral, legal, microeconomic, and other reasons to promote a more just and equitable society,” wrote Janis Bowdler, counselor for racial equity, and Benjamin Harris, assistant secretary for economic policy, last week in a new series of blog posts on discrimination and economic policy by the U.S. Treasury Department. “The economic cost of racial inequality is borne not just by the individuals directly faced with limited opportunities, but also has spillovers to the entire U.S. economy.”

Societies become more just and compassionate gradually, through gestures and reforms that are not always widely evident or immediately felt. In the U.S., they may be gaining traction.