The Supreme Court has sanctioned PARTISAN gerrymandering. Got that? Let's review that one time.
The Supreme Court has sanctioned PARTISAN gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court has sanctioned PARTISAN gerrymandering.
Yep. It is called corruption.
Since the Supreme Court has decided gerrymandering, currently called redistricting is the way political advantages are won in the USA, it is time for all Democratic Governors to get down and dirty. Sorry, but, there is no real ethical way to play fair anymore.
The Supreme Court, Gerrymandering, and the Rule of Law (click here)
SummaryConstitutionally, gerrymandering is the equivalent of giving every Republican in the state two votes while giving only one to every Democrat.
In Baker v. Carr, Justice William J. Brennan notes two basic situations in which a constitutional claim should be treated as a non-justiciable political question.
Rucho v. Common Cause is the first case after the decision in Carr in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that it could not develop manageable standards and concluded that there was no way to establish standards for identifying unconstitutional maps.
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Although the U.S. Supreme Court has undermined the rule of law in a whole variety of areas, its treatment of partisan gerrymandering is arguably the most destructive. The reason is that gerrymandering is the one area of the law where the Court itself acknowledges that state and local officials are regularly violating the Constitution, but it has refused to allow any federal judicial remedy. And it has done that based solely on the highly debatable suggestion that it is just too difficult to establish standards for separating lawful from unlawful conduct. The Court created this problem by ruling, in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, that any federal constitutional challenge to a district map, based on the theory that it is a partisan gerrymander, presents a non-justiciable “political question.” As a result, in this one field, there is literally no “rule of law” because the Constitution can be violated with no consequences.
What Is a Gerrymander?
A partisan gerrymander is a district map—for Congress, or for a state legislature, county commission, and the like—that is intentionally designed to enhance the power of one political party at the expense of the other, regardless of how the people of the jurisdiction may choose to vote in a given election. This is a uniquely American problem because we are the only democracy in the world with two features—(1) the use of single-member “first past the post” districts (an inheritance from the British), and (2) systems that allow partisan legislators to draw the maps that we use (in most states). In other countries, if districts are used, they are drawn by non-partisan officials. And in most of the world’s democracies, there are mechanisms to ensure that seats in the legislative body are proportional to the votes cast by the people....
A partisan gerrymander is a district map—for Congress, or for a state legislature, county commission, and the like—that is intentionally designed to enhance the power of one political party at the expense of the other, regardless of how the people of the jurisdiction may choose to vote in a given election. This is a uniquely American problem because we are the only democracy in the world with two features—(1) the use of single-member “first past the post” districts (an inheritance from the British), and (2) systems that allow partisan legislators to draw the maps that we use (in most states). In other countries, if districts are used, they are drawn by non-partisan officials. And in most of the world’s democracies, there are mechanisms to ensure that seats in the legislative body are proportional to the votes cast by the people....
