The only conclusion of the Supreme Court on Thursday was that extreme partisan gerrymandering is a political question that’s none of their business, and furthermore, should be left up to Congress or state legislatures to decide… which punts the issue directly back to the people in charge of doing the gerrymandering in the first place — something that was all too easily and shamelessly admitted by Rep. David Lewis, an N.C. Republican who was on the forefront of the redistricting efforts.During the legislative session when the maps were drawn, Lewis openly “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to ten Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats.”(and this was after the federal court found congressional districts drawn in 2011 to include unconstitutional racial gerrymanders).Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating district boundaries.North Carolina is a state where members of the General Assembly draw the maps for their own elections to the state House and Senate, as well as for federal elections to the U.S. House.
Just ask the people of North Carolina and Maryland.The ‘core principle of republican government,’ this Court has recognized, is that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.Partisan gerrymandering turns it the other way around. Its goal is to insulate those in power from accountability to the voting public. In some states, it will favor Democrats; in more states, it will favor Republicans. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats,” he said, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”The plan worked. In a momentous decision, the court closed the door on such claims.The drafters of the Constitution, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority, understood that politics would play a role in drawing election districts when they gave the task to state legislatures. 18-422, and Lamone v. Benisek, No.
Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. The lawyer had argued in court papers that "map drawers methodically dismantled the sixth district, breaking apart large swaths of territory dominated by rural Republicans and replacing them with smaller, densely populated areas dominated by suburban Democrats. Nothing could be more undemocratic.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Wisconsin Republican lawmakers violated the constitutional rights of voters when they … If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.And checking them is not beyond the courts. And then they get to decide, at regular intervals, whether to keep them.Election day — next year, and two years later, and two years after that — is what links the people to their representatives, and gives the people their sovereign power. The demographics of these districts are an extremely important factor in determining which political party gets to control the state government.Every 10 years, after the Census, state political boundaries are redrawn to account for population changes. But what it really favors is polarization, because primary elections will become more important than the general election for many seats in the House of Representatives -- and candidates usually have to run to their base in primaries," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent. "Riggs pointed out that Republicans won 53% of the vote in the 2016 election but they also won 10 of the state's 13 congressional seats.Riggs had warned the justices that if they don't step in now, the use of politics will only get worse as map drawers rely increasingly on redistricting software that has become more sophisticated, adding that studies show the ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is larger than ever before.The other case, Lamone v. Benisek, came from Maryland. Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering. Justice Kennedy, in his questions last term and in “If a state passed an enactment that declared ‘All future apportionment shall be drawn so as most to burden Party X’s rights to fair and effective representation, though still in accord with one-person, one-vote principles,’” he wrote in 2004, “we would surely conclude the Constitution had been violated.”On Thursday, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that his majority opinion was a modest one that recognized the limits of judicial power.“No one can accuse this court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence,” he wrote.
With the case here in my home state of North Carolina (as well as in Maryland), the U.S. Supreme Court had the tremendous opportunity to do something right in an otherwise dumpster fire of a trio of years. 18-726. And the power becomes, as Madison put it, ‘in the Government over the people.’…For the first time in this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply… In North Carolina, however the political winds blow, there are 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats…Of all times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, speaks with Soledad O’Brien about the cases most likely to head to the Supreme Court … Every ten years, after each census, the N.C. legislation draws these districts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims…But yes, the standards do allow — as well they should — judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms.In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. "Of all times to abandon the Court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one," Kagan said.