Supreme Court rules federal courts cannot invalidate partisan gerrymandering [pdf]
supremecourt.gov
supremecourt.gov
This section really resonates:
> It is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context. It may mean achieving a greater number of competitive districts by undoing packing and cracking so that supporters of the disadvantaged party have a better shot at electing their preferred candidates. But it could mean engaging in cracking and packing to ensure each party its “appropriate” share of “safe” seats. Or perhaps it should be measured by adherence to “traditional” districting criteria. Deciding among those different visions of fairness poses basic questions that are political, not legal. There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments. And it is only after determining how to define fairness that one can even begin to answer the determinative question: “How much is too much?”
"It is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context."
Except it IS clear what unfairness looks like, and it's this.
“How much is too much?”
This, what they are doing right hear right now, this is too much. I have to assume it's obvious to the majority here and they know what they're doing.
Kagan's dissent is great and finishes with this which REALLY resonates with me:
"Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent. "
There's a reasonable back and forth between the majority and minority on this question. The majority rejects unilaterally expanding the set of criteria the courts can use to overturn political maps. There's a good separation-of-powers argument for that conservatism.
(The court would prefer another branch decide what is and isn't too partisan, in the way Congress defined what is illegal racial gerrymandering.)
That’s not sufficient. You need to be able to also identify what districting maps are fair enough. As soon as you open the door to these kinds of lawsuits, every districting map will get challenged in court by the minority party. If you don’t have a standard for being able to throw out most of those cases, you’ll have the federal judiciary deeply enmeshed in redistricting disputes.
“We’ll only have the judiciary step in for the the most egregious cases” never works. You see that in contexts like Establishment Clause litigation, where people are suing over whether letting religious student organizations use school facilities is an establishment clause violation. In that area, legitimately egregious conduct is long in the past (if it ever existed at scale) and courts have become just another political tool in the culture war. There is a reason the Supreme Court has resisted the urge to take a “we’ll step in only for the most egregious cases” approach with the First Amendment. Video games marketed to kids where you blow away prostitutes? Go for it. We’re not going to police that.
You can’t get judges to police everything. If duly elected Democrats in maryland want to screw over republicans and strip them of voting rights, then there are problems with our society judges can’t fix.
Sometimes the randomness will work in favor of one party, sometimes against it. In the long term, it adds in some non-partisan non-determinism, which is probably good for justice long-term.
This sidesteps the question of values entirely.
Actually no. The court only needs to find that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, and then leave it up to the states and lower courts to figure out which kinds of map drawing is constitutional.
It's already not legal to have districts that don't represent the same number of people. E.g.
I'm inclined to agree with the majority. I don't see a solution for this problem that isn't a messy and partially flawed political compromise, and those need to come from the States or Congress.
The fairest thing to do would be to eliminate districts and allow a voter to identify which candidate(s) they support. That offers the voter the ability to self select fair representation of the interests that matter to them. Yes, this does imply an alternative voting method.
Maybe one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
There's a very old assumption that local elections (i.e. within a district) are the fairest way for the interests of the people to be represented. Politics ought to be as decentralized as possible - all the arguments, discussions, and decisions about "what we want" should take place locally when electing a representative.
While your proposal may help governments to more accurately represent the will of the people en masse or in aggregate, I suspect it would only further contribute to a sense of division, especially in a local sense.
The court initially gained the power of judicial review under Marbury vs Madison. SCotUS can standardize the application of the law by interpreting it or the constitution in a specific way like ruling that the "Well regulate militia," part of the 2A is less important than "the right to bear arms" part. The court has used this power before to step in when other branches or states could not agree or even work together like desegregating public schools (Brown V Board of Education, unanimous decision). I think we are at a similar point with gerrymandering. Some states benefit from it and the people in power want/need it to stay in place so like term limits won't be considered at all until the power balance flips. But the power balance can't flip due to gerrymandering. SCotUS won't put their finger on the other side of the scale to force that change and address the issue either.
I'm wondering how much the decision gets into one person, one vote doctrine. Districts within a state must have similar population and voting power. If a district is designed to favor a specific party they could hold such partisan gerrymandering makes voters of the opposite party's vote effectively not count and violate One Person, One Vote precedent. It may then be held that districts should be drawn in a way that doesn't involve partisan lean along with other protected classes like race or sex. The hard part isn't the decision itself but how the majority opinion lays out or sets up what comes next. I think that's where the court couldn't agree and why we have such a milquetoast rejection of the branches power to do something.
If they couldn't agree how to rank districts on partisan bias (say with the efficiency gap), where the line is drawn for gerrymandering (if it's 60%, then they'll be drawn to 59.99% next time etc), or how to advise redrawing without stepping on states rights to determine how voting works (the constitution lays out a few requirements but leaves much to each state to decide), then this decision makes sense. But they probably could have sorted that out when considering to take the case at all. Maybe they needed to take the case due to the mess of initial decisions in lower courts as it would come up again and they wanted to get ahead of that.
I'm reading this as a punt but hard pass on making anyone responsible for the problem. I think you're right though as if the vote went the other way fallout would be messy, possibly get the court called out for activism (I think we needed it here but that's my opinion), and not consider possible responses that make the problem worse or legal arguments like if gerrymandering for party isn't valid like for race then party affiliation is a protected class.
After typing this out, I think they could have rejected the case with minor fallout with notes that it needs to be handled by the proper branch of government like Congress or the states. But they accepted the case then couldn't sort out how a ruling against partisan gerrymandering would work or fallout, and here we are.
I like your line of thinking there, but I can't help but think they knew exactly what they were doing when they took it. Knowing what we know about Alito and Thomas they would've jumped at this type of decision, probably Gorsuch and Kav as well.
California was gerrymandered to the extreme and it took two ballots directly to the people to move to an independent commission, the last only in 2010. Both were opposed by lawmakers, so it’ll be slow going state by state.
So, it's not a question of what the law says, it's a question of _values_, of what the law _should_ say. You could argue either side of that, but saying that the Constitution or precedents give a clear guideline for a judge to use in deciding it, is not tenable.
Let's say the courts decided to intervene here. What standard should they give? "If it seems really unfair, strike it down?" What looks really unfair to a Democratic-appointed judge is going to be different than what looks really unfair to a Republican-appointed judge.
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said recently, "However one comes out on the legal issues, partisan gerrymandering unsettles the fundamental premise that people elect their representatives, not vice versa."
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ruth-bader-ginsburg-par...
The fact that RGB says "However one comes out on the legal issues..." looks like evidence that, at some level, she knows there's not a legal argument here to arrive at the right result. Because the right result is surely to not do things the way we do now. Probably, some kind of multi-rep district system is the right solution. But, that's not a thing the courts can fix, or should attempt to, and they know it.
No, they don't, unless you view sigle-member districts as mandatory; the fact that sigle-member districts (or, rather, any winner-take-all districts in states with more than a single seat) make essential elements of fairness incompatible reveals that such districts are problematic, sure.
So... what does it look like, specifically?
My understanding of the ruling is not that it’s ok to be fair, but that at this point we can’t even balance all the dimensions of fairness to get a single measure.
If you cannot inject unfairness during the process, the only unfairness you can output is a different expression of the unfairness that already existed when you started it. You can't intentionally make it worse.
I have personally seen dozens of algorithmic redistricting proposals that naively optimize for "geographic compactness". Those maps look fair. But you don't need to use the interocular test--you can use math and produce an objective measure of compactness. The only question is which one to pick.
Pick any of them, arbitrarily. It will set an upper limit on the impact of malicious gerrymandering, and be more fair than when completely unconstrained.
Gerrymandering is a symptom of a broken system: badly proportionate representation due to First Past the Post elections. If we had order of preference voting with instance runoff, or Mixed-Member Proportional, policies would be much better at reflecting the opinions held by the people in the regions where politicians are elected. (I did a post on this a few years back: https://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differe...)
Maine has ranked voting now, and I hope we see it in more states. I think the solution to our broken political system is not fixing district lines, but to move to voting systems where those lines don't matter, where votes cannot be thrown away and where elected officials come into power representing many different viewpoints of their electorate.
If you keep your heavily partisan districts, ranked choice isn't going to fix things if you've used data to ensure that the people in that districts are likely to vote the way you want. Ranked choice (or similar changes) doesn't create a more balanced partisan body in the district, it just changes the need for a Primary to decide who will be represented.
Districts matter because they're baked into the system. You want to get rid of them, that's a whole other can of worms but you can't pretend that drawing 3 districts, one with a +20% conservative lean, the other with a +20% conservative lean and the 3rd with a +90% liberal lean isn't going to continue being a problem.
Your plan is great at fracturing the parties, but that assumes that there's any value in that.
This is less probable with districts because in general races are not well-mixed in American cities in terms of spatial distribution.
Ranked voting solves a specific issue: voting for a government position for which there is a single position: eg president, governor, etc
Many people think the SC's job is to decide what is "good" for our country, but actually that is the Legislative's job. The SC's job is to interpret the law and apply it fairly. The opinion actually says that gerrymandering can reasonably be argued to be unfair, but just that deciding that is IS unfair is not within the realm of the federal courts.
The opinion is well written and I think it was correctly decided. That being said, I do think Gerrymandering is a real problem, but I think it needs to be solved with new laws, not with a SC decision.
Who writes the laws, and how are they selected?
Duh.
Happily they’ve filled two Supreme Court seats, one by prohibiting a sitting president from getting any nomination through for An entire year
[edit to note that both parties in the US do this wherever they have power to]
> In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that partisan-gerrymandering claims pose particularly difficult problems for courts because it is well settled that legislatures can consider politics when drawing district maps. The question that courts would have to decide is when the consideration of politics has gone too far and violates the Constitution.
> But there’s no requirement, Roberts wrote, that a party’s representation in a congressional delegation or state legislature reflect its share of the statewide vote – a concept known as proportional representation.
As reported by NPR [0]:
> "Technology is both a threat and a promise," he wrote, noting that with the advent of computer technology, the temptation to leverage partisan advantage would "only grow" unless constrained by the courts. His hope, he wrote, was that "new technologies may produce new methods of analysis" for the courts to use in identifying and remedying the problem.
So. Let's talk about ethics. This is a community that sees the issue, understands the subtle ways in which data and algorithms can be manipulated to systematically disenfranchise people, and has the power to create the tools that Justice Kennedy wrote about. This is also a community that has the power to resist -- to not let its expertise and skills fall under the employ of those that would harm democracy.
Where's the action?
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/704523712/the-supreme-court-t...
How can each vote carry equal weight if 60% of the voters get to select 30% of the elected officials?
I think political parties are a non-entity as far as the US constitution (small 'c') is concerned, aren't they? So the court doesn't have any opinion on them and there are no requirements.
Some countries, like the UK, have a constitution but no Constitution.
1. It would be harder to create such an independent commission in the US, because Americans (and especially Republicans) have worked tirelessly to make every corner of their lives another opportunity for partisanship. Americans elect _far_ too many officials, and those elections almost invariably end up partisan because a party has the muscle to win you the election. For example, in the US all those Supreme Court justices who wrote this decision and its dissents are in effect partisan, even though in principle it's not supposed to be a partisan body. In the UK the Supreme Court is just a bunch of judges that other judges and lawyers thought should be elevated, not a partisan issue.
2. Because Parliament is sovereign the Parliament has to actually enact those boundaries after the commission proposes them. Historically there is always a political party that thinks these changes are a bad idea conveniently for them because it somehow always seems to be the party that will likely lose seats. Because the Commission itself is impartial which party is angry about this varies, but in recent history it's Labour. When proposals to actually apply the current recommendations are coming up, I can always expect about one Facebook post a week from somebody who had no idea how boundaries work, or that there's an independent commission in charge of this, who has been convinced "somehow" that the party they don't like has conspired to take seats away from the one they do like via these boundary changes. Big surprise.
3. To be fair we got here because historically UK boundaries were left unchanged for so long that we had the Rotten Boroughs, a situation where some random land owner might own an area which was entitled to be represented by an MP even though literally _nobody_ had lived there for decades. You will not be surprised to learn that this caused _horrendous_ levels of corruption, bad enough that the act of parliament to fix it was routinely called the Great Reform Act (legally "Representation of the People Act 1832") and had to be rammed through by the same sort of extreme measures we've seen Democrats talking about in the US to fix its democracy.
Your vote is measured the same way as my vote. Your vote doesn't equal three-fifths of mine.
There is apparently not a Federal regulation on crafting districts such that they overall skew in a given direction. In practice this can and does result in your vote being effectively worthless if you are in a district that is not your particular flavor.
Depending on your philosophies, the judiciary is not tasked with legislation or "correcting wrongs" but with evaluating the current ruleset and determining if things are correct given those rules. So despite that you and I can look and say "well regardless of the letter of the law, the outcome surely isn't right" you have those that view this as not being in their power to change. The law legislates the way in which the vote is counted, not in the district-creation process.
One would assume this is how his head remains intact.
We look at gerrymandering through the lens of "fairness", and we find it unfair when one group cannot get reasonably proportional representation in the legislature. But we are all members of many groups. We belong to political parties, racial groups, regional groups, economic groups, social classes and personality groups -- how can all of them get a voice which is proportional to their numbers? There's no clear-cut solution.
This is the core problem with most gerrymandering jurisprudence -- it looks at at the problem mostly through a racial lens, and more recently, a partisan one. But the world is more complex than that. Voter's interests are not solely determined by the color of their skin or their political party.
The court is not saying that gerrymandering is okay. The court is saying that they don't have a solution, or at least not one that can be imposed by courts. The court is more constrained than a legislature in finding a solution, because the court must override state laws based on a reasonable reading of federal law, in this case the Voting Rights Act, or the Constitution. And unfortunately, both of those sources are nearly silent on the matter. It is not within the courts power to create law from nothing, notwithstanding Kagan's dissent.
In the past, we decided that the appropriate grouping for the election of representatives was geographic. It's not ideal, but it's the best of bad options. Our current gerrymanders are a perversion of that principle, and we are right to look for a solution that leads to cleaner, more compact districts.
The court has said that it's not theirs to decide the issue. I'm not sure I agree, because current gerrymanders are an incumbent protection racket, and that looks to me like a civil rights violation. But in any case, it is well within the power of Congress to fix the problem through an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, and they certainly should.
Except that the Senate is controlled by Republicans and Republicans, on the whole, benefit more from gerrymandering. Even when the words and intentions of GOP are made clear, "we gerrymandered black peoples' districts to reduce their representation", it's still hard to remove that entrenched power. What's more, because of the pro-rural bias of the Senate, the rural allegiance to the GOP, and the electoral college disadvantaging urban centers, this entrenched GOP will continue to have a disproportionate share of power.
The Democrats try to play clean and fair, meanwhile the deck is stacked against them, and they still naively don't shift back towards gaining rural voters who they need for the Senate. Until the Fox News loving Silent Gen and Boomers die off, the GOP will cling to a disproportionate share of power.
I was involved in a gerrymandering case in the 1990s. The group that brought me in was challenging the Illinois congressional map, which had been drawn by Democrats. It was, and is, atrocious. Back then, the map was a deal between the white Democrats who wanted to hold some white seats that extended into the suburbs, and some black Democrats who wanted incumbent protection.
Back then, the Democrats were the ones across the country who were protecting racial gerrymanders because they wanted to ensure that any area with a substantial black population was never represented by a Republican. They drew the districts in Illinois to ensure as many black-majority districts as possible (and one Hispanic-majority district). The districts were completely convoluted. They made arguments that the Voting Rights Act actually required racial gerrymanders.
Our side challenged the districts. The other side, defending the gerrymander, was led by the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, and they brought in the Clinton Administration Justice Department as defendant-intervenors. That's right -- the primary defender of gerrymanders was the Clinton Administration. They were involved in similar suits, making similar claims, across the country.
Demographics have shifted a bit since then, and now we have more Republican gerrymanders than Democrat ones. But make no mistake -- the original convoluted maps were all Democrat, and virtually all Supreme Court gerrymandering-related precedent during the era came as a result of Democrat defense of the maps.
So don't try to claim that Democrats "play clean and fair". That's rubbish. They created this problem, and only now are shifting their views of gerrymandering because it is no longer working to their benefit. They, like most politicians, are opportunists.
Disclosure: I'm now the chairman of the Chicago Republican Party.
What are your stances on climate change? If you have a sane, science-backed viewpoint, it'd be much easier for me to vote for you, given you're a GOP member. As it stands, 95% of your entire party has abandoned the planet's future, and I can not in good conscience vote for anyone who takes the GOP label and doesn't speak out against denialists and the fossil fuel cabal.
I went to UChicago, FWIW, and there are some decent economics-based policy proposals about climate change from right-wing thinkers. It's a shame your party is so beholden to fossil fuel interests.
One cannot expect those that benefit from X to write laws restricting X. It's why money will never be out of politics. There will never be enough people in Congress to sacrificially agree to such an idea.
At the state level, it depends on the number of districts. Some states are at large (one district) so it doesn't matter greatly, and on the other end of the spectrum you have places like Texas and Cali where there's so many districts that it would be hard to affect. But if you hit that sweets spot of like 2-5 districts (which represents 15 states) than the Map could have a huge effect on things.
One fix is to use multi-representative districts, e.g. you draw only two districts in that 10 member state, and in each district people are voting for _five_ representatives. If there are parties you can use this thing called the Jefferson system (yes named after that Jefferson) to pick members of parties to fill those five seats per district with a single vote per person in a fair way. We can expect that in this 80:20 scenario each district would send one minority party member and four majority party members. The way Jefferson works, getting five out of five members is going to need you to really _crush_ your opponents, because in effect for that last seat every vote helps them five times more than you - even "useless" votes like somebody who wrote in "Michelle Obama" make it harder for them to win that last seat.
In reality though things aren't that conveniently mixed. Most likely an 80:20 state has very different ratios in its big cities than in rural agricultural land, or on an Indian reservation, or between a college town and an otherwise similar town with no students. Gerrymandering is about drawing lines on a map so that say 40% of the people in one district are blue, even though it's 20% state wide, whereas maybe if you'd just "naturally" put the line around the big city it'd be 56% blue and they'd get a blue representative. This feels intuitively unfair, and it's frustrating that a Supreme Court felt able to say well, too bad, we don't "know" what fair even is.
For those who want a more in-depth look at gerrymandering and why it's not simply or easy to fix, I highly recommend this series from 538. They do a great job highlighting complicated wrinkles with common gerrymandering solutions and pointing out ideas you may not have previously thought.
Disappointing indeed!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/partisan-g...
“Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary. We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
The chickens protest to the farmer that the fox is eating them. The farmer says, right but what can I do it's the fox eating you?
Everything is a political question...especially when you make it one.
The case in front of the courts was about redistricting being politicized. To use the fact that it is being politicized to claim you can't take action to protect people's fundamental right to effective representation is an embarrassing argument. It's willful ignorance towards a goal.
> 1. Partisan gerrymandering is lawful.
> 2. Racial gerrymandering is not lawful.
> 3. Race is among the strongest predictors of partisanship.
> 4. Square this circle - go!
Oh please vote... just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side. Oh and ya the electoral college will overwrite the vote of the majority. Democracy?
Overloaded districts just shift the debate from generals to primaries. I live in Manhattan. It will pretty much always vote blue. That doesn't mean there isn't political competition.
A regression to Jim Crow era practices is a serious setback.
Ignoring all of that history, and taking your statement in good faith, it still is reductive to pretend that we're in the same state as the 18th century. Voters are much more diverse, and the technology exists to precisely draw districts to achieve very precise outcomes. The increased precision and ability to do things at scale is a differentiating factor, as well as the increased consequences; a voting population that's just "land owning white males" might see gerrymandering as less extreme that the much more diverse distribution of beliefs we have in the current voting population.
The current problems with gerrymandering are huge. Issues that have super majority support among the population (reproductive rights, immigration reform, drug reform, gun control) are controlled by an increasingly small population of voters. You can (and even may be correct) claim that this represents the wills of the founders; it's a much harder sell to claim that this is a "good thing" that the people shouldn't be able to push back against.
Partisan gerrymandering has not.
Also, remember that this is the same court in which three justices (Gorsuch/Thomas/Kavanaugh in Kisor and Thomas again in Gamble) have openly called for ignoring stare decisis when it doesn't suit their political objectives. For them to cite precedent and/or judicial humility in any decision at this point is dishonest.
That's exactly the issue I was getting at. Equal representation is clearly a constitutional issue, which it is the court's duty to rule on, and yet the constitution does not explicitly address districting issues. Would defining a standard to determine whether a districting plan meets the constitutional requirement be within the court's purview? Clearly yes, because that kind of standard-setting is a significant part of what they have always done. It's right in the introduction to the Wikipedia list of landmark decisions.
"establishing a "test" or a measurable standard that can be applied by courts in future decisions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisio...
Declining to set such a standard because such things are delegated to the states would have been reasonable. Declining to set such a standard because it's a "political" - i.e. legislative - responsibility is also reasonable. But "because the constitution" doesn't work because the constitution is mute on the specifics on which the court was asked to rule. They can't overturn what doesn't exist.
>"Gerrymandering," the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries so as to maximize partisan advantage, is far from new. Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor whose name literally became synonymous with the practice, worked his magic to create a salamander-shaped district over two hundred years ago.
https://origins.osu.edu/article/re-mapping-american-politics...
When you can't vote out your representatives through electoral means, what means remain?
Perhaps candidates should start appealing to more people and winning elections instead of pandering to particular blocks of people.
For that singular district the answer might mean color yourself purple, but if done correctly this allows for a party that represents a minority of voters to control things on a state or national level. It's the same problem people have with the electoral collage. You can win a majority of the votes (either by being a partisan or by being a centrist) and lose because maps.
Yes, the rules of the game suck and should be changed. As a citizen, there are many ways you can work towards that end. Regardless, the game is still being played and not voting is a move in the game that almost never benefits your own interests.
Do you know who got the most votes in the 2016 presidential election? It wasn't Trump. It wasn't Hillary, either. It was no one. The number of people who could have voted outnumbers the votes either candidate got.
People who stayed home chose to affect that election more than any other group of people.
Claiming that "people that choose to stay at home" are all independent of the system that effectively disenfranchises them is problematic.
Sadly, we probably will not do so because those barriers (and the resulting suppression of votes) is politically beneficial to some.
People like to claim both parties are the same, but look at how often Democratic politicians try to increase voting access and how often Republicans try to limit it. Their actions are telling you something.
It does not. Like I said, work to fix the systemic problems.
Also, go vote. These are not mutually exclusive actions.
There is a pernicious idea that not voting is a viable strategy to register your discontent or stick it to the man. This a nonsense belief perpetrated by people in power — especially Republicans — who want you to not vote. The fewer people who vote, the cheaper it is to influence enough people to swing an election.
Anyone who suggests its OK to not vote doesn't have your best interests at heart. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate things making it difficult to vote. Those are problems that should be fixed. In the meantime, vote.
In North Carolina, the GOP used their ability to draw the districts in ways that allowed them to get a veto-proof super-majority in the state General Assembly. Then, they passed law after law restricting people's ability to get out and vote. Closing polling stations, requiring ID that many disadvantaged people don't have easy access to, restricting early voting. They even tried to make the state Election Board a completely partisan office by making it appointed solely by the General Assembly (which they controlled) rather than the Governor's office (who is a Democrat.)
All of that stopped once they lost their veto-proof majority, and they only lost it because the courts determined they had illegally drawn the districts. It wasn't people finally deciding to get out and vote. It was that people who had always been eligible to vote had their districts redrawn in a way that allowed their vote to actually count (albeit, barely.)
I would ask everyone to pause a minute before posting and ask if the comment adds substance to the discussion. If you have support for your argument, include it. If you use numbers, please back them up.
Looks like SCOTUS needs congress to hold their hands and spell everything out in laws that will almost certainly contain loop holes.
Why is this supreme court unable (unwilling?) to think for themselves?
I should note that this didn't go to the Supreme Court because it was purely a state matter, and ruled based on the state's constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_North_...
Yea title is a little off. They're pretty specific that it was only federal courts.
Basically what I am seeing is a class of laws that can be appealed at a state level, but not at a federal level. Not an expert on the legal system, but is there precedent for this on a constitutional topic (like voting)?
Or that any party could gather a large majority of votes, and not actually have any control.
We need a wholesale reconsideration of our election fairness and security practices in this country.
i can't wait to see what districts look like in a few years now that there's 0 potential for voters to be heard.
There's of course always the chance that the party in power will see that preventing gerrymandering will hurt them more than it will help them, but that won't always be the case.
Yes, at least for federal election districts. (The power is shared with the states, though.)
The crux of the SCOTUS decision is the court has no way to define fairness when it comes to drawing political boundaries. Congress passed a law banning gerrymandering using racial criteria, so courts can overrule maps on that basis. But Congress hasn't addressed partisan gerrymandering. The courts, rightfully in my opinion, after reading the SCOTUS opinion, are rejecting the right to unilaterally expand the set of criteria upon which they can reject political maps.
It's not cognitive dissonance, it's bad faith
When voters dogmatically lock-in to a party affiliation for decades/generations it leaves politicians with zero incentive to listen to them and shifts their focus to drawing safe-districts.
The best way for voters to be heard is to radically reject all party-lock-in-narratives and fire anyone who is in a safe seat - irrespective of everything else.
1. Both parties do this now and have done it historically. It is no more a danger today than it has ever been in the past and the Republic has lived and thrived with this system. Generally what it does it create a magnification of power for a party that is in a slight majority position, which can create more continuity in government and allow their ideas to make it into actual law over opposition. This is not a necessarily a bad thing. Voters get to see the full affects of a party's agenda take place and then if they don't like it, the party tends to get thrown out wholesale and the other 'team' ends up with similar magnification to implement their agenda. See Texas and California where this has played out in opposite directions in recent decades.
2. Modesty in the judiciary is a very good thing. Notice that the new 'ultra-conservative' judges have regularly been crossing over to join with the court liberals this term. Why? Because their underlying philosophy is to interpret the law and constitution as written. I appreciate here that they are calling out that the actions taken by the legislatures are not necessarily appropriate, but respecting the boundaries of what their constitutional role will often play to the advantage of those who disagree with this particular ruling. If they were true 'movement' conservatives dictating by desired outcome rather than the law, they could easily slip into a tyrannical mode from the POV of many here. Instead the worst you can say is that they are trying to enforce the law and Constitution as written and you can use your vote to get those changed.
I wish other people would not downvote a well-reasoned comment.
> In considering whether partisan gerrymandering claims are justiciable, we are mindful of Justice Kennedy’s counsel in Vieth: Any standard for resolving such claims must be grounded in a “limited and precise rationale” and be “clear, manageable, and politically neutral.” 541 U. S., at 306–308 (opinion concurring in judgment). An important reason for those careful constraints is that, as a Justice with extensive experience in state and local politics put it, “[t]he opportunity to control the drawing of electoral boundaries through the legislative process of apportionment is a critical and traditional part of politics in the United States.” Bandemer, 478 U. S., at 145 (opinion of O’Connor, J.). See Gaffney, 412 U. S., at 749 (observing that districting implicates “fundamental ‘choices about the nature of representation’” (quoting Burns v. Richardson, 384 U. S. 73, 92 (1966))). An expansive standard requiring “the correction of all election district lines drawn for partisan reasons would commit federal and state courts to unprecedented intervention in the American political process,” Vieth, 541 U. S., at 306 (opinion of Kennedy, J.).
One of the cases underlying this Supreme Court decision involves egregious Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland, my home state. The Congressional district my house should be in looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_3rd_congressional.... It's shaped that way to dilute the republicans in Annapolis with democrats from Prince Georges County, and push the rest of the southeast Maryland republicans into district 5.
This is clearly bad. But the question is, is it the role of the federal courts to do something about it? What do you think the reaction in Maryland would be if a Trump-appointed federal judge invalidated this district on constitutional grounds? This decision protects the federal judiciary from the inevitable shit show that would ensue in that and similar situations.
Life is way too complex NOT to be governed (at the highest levels) by philosopher kings.
Supreme Court justices should (at least partially) be considered "problem solvers", not archaeologists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistrict...
Pack the SC until they stop making corrupt decisions.
So maybe he didn't violate the law, but he certainly didn't uphold his Constitutional responsibilities, which I believe is part of the Oath of Office he took.
This is how Congress and the co-equal branches of government are designed to work. Congress and the President often don't get along. It's a feature, not a bug.
McConnell took a gamble that paid off for his party- if the voters had chosen Hilary there is a very good chance she would have nominated a more leftist judge than Obama had. In the end it was actually a very prominent campaign issue and therefore was directly a choice before the voters, which in my mind would make it more legitimate in a 'democratic' context than the usual.
> [...] if the voters had chosen Hilary there is a very good chance she would have nominated a more leftist judge than Obama had.
Under your logic, they could have just waited for a Republican to become president before they voted to confirm any judges. Granted, that would have been an even bigger gamble (what if they lose the majority in the Senate in the meantime?), and even more justices could die or retire in the meantime.
How many seats need to be open before you would say the Senate must confirm someone? (1? 2? 5? 9?) How long are they allowed to wait? (6 months? a year? 4 years? 8 years?) . How dysfunctional could our government become before your logic implies the need to act?
I can't comment on what popular sentiment was in 1888.
Mind you, I'm no Trump fan, but "legal" is literally the only relevant definition of legitimacy in this context.
If the process by which Trump was elected was illegitimate, then the process by which all American Presidents have been elected is illegitimate. Americans have had two centuries to change the electoral college, and have not done so, because clearly voters have no problems with it when it benefits their side. Neither the presence nor the absence of a majority vote is, or has ever been, relevant.
We went though this with Obama, and a not-insignificant segment of the population believing him to be illegitimate. Before Obama, people on the left thought George W. Bush stole the election because of the debacle that was Florida.
It's a poisonous precedent to set, particularly in the radicalized atmosphere we find ourselves in, not to recognize the legitimacy of a government just because the "wrong" candidate won under the rules. How many more of these "illegitimate" Presidents are we going to go through before the losing side just decides to start shooting?
I hate Trump as much as any reasonable person, but Americans got exactly what they wanted, and deserved, with him.
Ask yourself who those other votes went for; who do you think they would most likely vote for in the runoff?
I'm a fan of instant-runoffs. That would dramatically change the political landscape.
1. Convince state legislatures to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which the Supreme Court will likely rule as unconstitutional)
2. Conduct an election where the popular vote winner differs from the electoral college winner (constitutional crisis ensues, along the lines of current Venezuelan situation)
3. Overcome the constitutional crisis and ensure that the popular vote winner becomes POTUS
That is the path forward if you want to pack the SC. Until then, the Senate will block any non-RNC president from appointing justices unless absolutely necessary.
At least now we can honestly say the system is still as vulnerable to being rigged as it was before.
I'm honestly at a loss for words.
EDIT: Words no longer 404ing. It appears the Court is not satisfied with the State's criteria/legal reasoning to justify justicable action against the districting plans. They hold the measure must be politically neutral, and have some basis in being legally addressed.
They go at length to describe circumstances to describe cases with inherent justicability (districting along racial demographics), but offer no hints or grasps as to a measure of degree at which political gerrymandering becomes "excessive".
It looks like Maryland attempted to use "likelihood of persistence" of the gerrymandered district, but this was dismissed on allowability based on previous precedent. "Intent" was also singled out in a couple different wordings, but did not hold satisfactorally for the Court.
Of particular concern was of the Federal Courts to support State Court's particular measures on what constitutes excessive gerrymandering. It seems the Court is nudging State populations to appeal to the Federal Legislature to oversee malconduct in individual State districting. I find this concerning, seeing as our Federal Legislature has enough on it's plate with getting things passed, and the last thing we want is to start having the different levels trying to micromanage each other.
I can sort of see some tiny speck of Wisdom in their judgement. I don't necessarily find it satisfying, but I have to grudgingly admit they at least reasoned it out.
On vulnerability to being rigged:
I Absolutely see gerrymandering as a form of systemic cheat. It is a legal option within the explicit constraints laid down by the Framers, however, from a systems oriented point of view, the practice of districting is meant as a way to geographically divide up up the space in a State in such a way as to allow representation to be ideally derived equitably via geographical proximity.
I find any attempt to try to engineer a district based on anything but geographical division to be highly suspect. I understand local footprints change, and redistricting may be required, but the process should be looked at as an technical apolitical consideration, rather than as a strategic way to exploit statistics to try to shift district lines into a more favorable arrangement for one party or another. My original statement was meant to clarify that the Supreme Court decision hasn't really changed anything in the grand scheme of things. I.e. no new vulnerabilities to gerrymandering were introduced. There was only a closing of the door on the Federal Courts picking sides.
On the rest; I find both Maryland and North Carolina's attempts to quantify and measure the effects of gerrymandering admirable, even if the Supreme Court chose to abstain from the fight. I'm not 100% clear, but I don't recall having seen SCOTUS overturning the lower court's judgements; they merely proclaimed that no precedent derived from either case had standing within the context of the Federal system, and further remedy would need to be sought either in the National Congress, or through State specific law. Then again, I may need to re-read.
Wasn't trying to start a flame war, even though apparently my initial knee-jerk reaction did. I could not understand how gerrymandering could have been casually tossed aside, even with their reasoning. It took a bit of stepping back to get the subtler points to crystallize.