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Comment by lordCarbonFiber | Hacker News Reader

The cognitive dissonance required to wax poetically about how voters should just get their representatives (elected and permanently in power because of these broken districts) to pass laws to redraw the broken districts is astounding to me. Checks and balances, never heard of them.

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.

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The thing is that there is potential for changes at the federal level to contradict this. If Congress is controlled by the Democrats, and they see many states with Republican-gerrymandered districts, they might see a way to increase their influence by legislatively preventing gerrymandering on the national level, forcing states to make their districts more fair.

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.

How would they do that? Pass a law? Does the federal government have that authority?

Probably not.

Wait, I am probably wrong about this; the Constitution explicitly delegates this power to the legislature.

> How would they do that? Pass a law? Does the federal government have that authority?

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.

They can do it without passing a law actually (which is a bit scary if you think about it.) Congress and congress alone has the power to determine its membership. They can simply pass a resolution stating that no member who was elected by a district that was gerrymandered by some specific criteria will be seated in the future. The courts can go pound sand if they don't like it.

Some of this has been litigated and it's not quite that black and white. Take a look at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack

Yes, the court can make such claims as they do in Powell, and Congress can ignore them. It is pure power politics, but the reputation of the court has been so diminished that Congress could easily get away with refusing to seat a member or two and there is really nothing that anyone could do to stop them.

You can make that argument about anything, though and it be would be equally applicable. 'The branches of the US government can start ignoring each other'. Sure, they could but that possibility doesn't really offer any useful insight. It's like saying I can become world heavyweight boxing champion by shooting my opponents.

Gerrymandering backfires when voters change parties easily and frequently. Loosely held party loyalties keep politicians on their feet and forces them to focus on actual voter's issues.

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.

> The cognitive dissonance

It's not cognitive dissonance, it's bad faith

This needs to be stated more loudly and often. Reasonable people can disagree, and civility demands providing disputants with the benefit of the doubt, which is institutionalized in the courts. But when enough evidence of bad faith accumulates, a reluctance to acknowledge it is moral cowardice at best, cynical symbiosis at worst.

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