They are never leaving
This is game over – the Supreme Court giving the green light to Republican gerrymandering from here to eternity (or terminal global warming). The Republicans hold the power now and they have permission to gerrymander to their hearts’ content so they will never be out of power, because they won’t allow it.
In a pair of cases out of North Carolina and Maryland raising the question of whether extreme partisan political gerrymanders can ever violate the Constitution, the five-justice conservative majority finally answered a decades-old question: The federal courts will have no role to play in overseeing whether political lines were drawn for the gain of the majority in violation of the Constitution.
Short version: we’re fucked.
To be sure, the chief justice knows how this all feels, to the millions of voters whose votes are and will be diluted and discounted by the majorities who draw lines: “Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” he concedes. “But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’ does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.” The solution, he would suggest, lies in state courts, constitutional amendments, state redistricting commissions (which he has deemed unconstitutional in the past), Congress, and state legislatures, which is a tiny bit like putting the looters in charge of the looting problem.
Which was the goal.
He ends with the noble caution that “No one can accuse this Court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence.” And, indeed, nobody does. We have in recent terms witnessed the courts view of its competence to dismantle the administrative state, to curb union power, to overturn prior precedent, to gut the Voting Rights Act, and to use the First Amendment as an all-purpose civil rights stun-gun. But its competence to do sweeping and consequential change stops, today, at the door of the political gerrymander. In the chief justice’s telling, this is neutral minimalism.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan calls out this learned helplessness in her very first line: “[F]or the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.” She adds that the doctrine here clouds the issue that:
The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.
And they will be left unchecked, so, yeah, game over.
Time for Oregon to gerrymander the need for Eastern Oregon out of existence…
This is misleading. In many cases, they are only the majority because of the redistricting, and it isn’t unusual for the Dems to get the majority of the votes, while the Reps get the majority of the seats. Talk of “the majority” sounds noble. Of course, the gain of the majority, isn’t that what democracy is about? Most people nod and think that’s reasonable.
But they wouldn’t need the partisan redistricting if they truly were the majority. They could draw up fair units and would still remain in power. Instead, this isn’t about any sort of majority; it is about a small group of wealthy men who want to hold on to power at the expense of what the people want.
Elected officials should not be allowed to draw political boundaries. And partisan hacks should never be given lifetime positions on the highest court in the land.
I thought “the majority” there meant “the current majority that did this gerrymandering.” I can’t make sense of it otherwise, because the whole point of gerrymandering is to guarantee a win for X no matter what the majority does.
Wikipedia shows 7 states are doing nonpartisan redistricting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Redistricting_commissions
I believe that map is out of date and there are least 2 more states now.
So…only 41 states to go!
What it really means is that it is time for Democrats to play by the same rules. There are 6 Republican congressmen from New York State. That should become perhaps two, who have 95%+ Republican majorities. Illinois has 5 Republican congress members. Two are 15+ Republican, one is around 8. Pack all of Southeastern Illinois into the 15th and 18th, run an algorithm to see if the 16th can be redistributed to Democrat. Illinois has several districts with Democrat margins of 20+, run those districts along the freeways out to the suburbs in the 16th to see if they can be carved off.
That should swing the House by 7 seats right there. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Naif
It’s so tempting I know, but that also lowers the Dems to the vulgar and immoral level of the GOP. I truely don’t know what the answer is, it not being my culture.
“No one can accuse this Court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence.”
The hell we can’t. What happened to the oath to uphold the Constitution? What happened to the concept of democratic self government? What happened to Marbury v. Madison?