SCOTUS: Upholds Gerrymandering, Strikes down Census question

I get their logic and it might even be the right answer under the Constitution. But, it means we're seriously screwed as a democracy.

They sent it to a lower court, and I guess there is still a chance for the Admin to offer a 'genuine' reason. But, yeah, looks like it's pretty much dead. Huzzah.

 

Basically when you are in power, you better do a really really good job of drawing the map so the other side will not come back any time soon.

 

Pretty much. It's only going to get worse. States will descend deeper and deeper into a weird fun house mirror version of representative democracy. 20 years ago we could have attacked this as a bipartisan issue, but shifting demographics have turned gerrymandering into a necessity for one party, and so the window of opportunity to curb it at the federal level (the only place you can realistically address it) is now gone. The writing is on the wall. Now it's just a matter of time. One can only hope that the suffering is minimal during the inevitable correction.

 

First, no surprise that the four right wing justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh) apparently had no issue at all with inclusion of the blatantly partisan question and only chief justice Roberts saw fit to join the other justices to speak out against the question.

Unfortunately, it appears that the supreme court is saying "its OK to include the question, just not be so obvious in the reasoning". So a more skilled lie will get it past next time.

And worse, Roberts decides to allow right wing partisan gerrymandering by ruling with the four right wing justices. What a huge blow to American democracy. Instead, the court is allowing a clear bastardization that favors the parties in power to tilt the playing fields and protect their majorities.

 

Gorsuch has leaned left on a lot of his decisions lately. He's showing that he has an independent thought process for the most part even though I don't agree with the gerrymandering decision.

 

On another note Clarence Thomas has to be the most useless supreme court justice we've ever had. I mean Thurgood Marshall has to be spinning in his grave.

 

Can someone explain their reasoning on gerrymandering? Is it all a "states rights" issue? Something else?
To me, it's more fundamental than that, because the issue involves electing federal representatives, and these federal representatives are elected in a way where some citizens' votes matter much more than others. It's a baldly anti-democratic act at its core.

I'm just honestly confused, my partisan blinders aside. Could, say, State X become a sort of weird fifedom where a pseudo-king had a kind of half-fake "election" and just appointed federal house and senate reps? And the SCOTUS would kind of shrug and say "well, what are u gonna do. LOL."

 

I see a couple of avenues of reform, all pretty unlikely.

1. Constitutional amendment to change how the House is populated. Given how much consensus an Amendment requires, we can probably forget that.

2. Federal legislation would probably lose in court, as a states' rights issue.

3. Individual states could amend state constitutions or pass legislation to require more fair apportionment. But, no one state would want to do that and allow themselves to be taken advantage of by the other states who continue to gerrymander. Maybe, maybe, a purple state would do it because both sides are afraid of losing state power in the wrong year.

4. Like the state-level electoral college reform, states can pass laws stop gerrymandering after some threshold of all states who pass such legislation is passed. That way a Texas can feel comfortable not gerrymandering if they know a California also won't. The problem is, if one party benefits more nationally from gerrymandering (and I think the Republicans would because they have more, but less populous, states) they wouldn't want to sign on.

So, yeah, we're screwed. Or another way to look at it, the federal government represents the states and not the people. The states elect the president via the EC. The Senate is elected by the states. Now the House is elected by the state legislatures. So, getting a partisan majority in state government is paramount for exercising federal power. Democrats really need to work on their ground game to have a chance.

 

Today was the most important day in the John Robert's court tenure IMO. This is Roberts making a pretty strong statement that political cheating is not something he'll stand in the way of even at the expense of our democracy, but just don't ask the Courts to do your dirty work for you. Keep us out of the cheating, or at least make credible arguments to the court, and you'll be fine. The only really reason the Census question wasn't added was because of the incompetence of those fumbling the argument to the court. Republican old schoolers like Dick Cheney, Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, George Bush sr. etc would have easily been able to handle getting this passed through the John Roberts Court.

In some ways it helps Democracy in the short term (aka Census question likely not being included), but in the long run I think Roberts is diminishing the biggest check & balance we have on the executive branch. Read Kagan's descent. It's a pretty sharp rebuke.

Its a "Tough Luck Democrats.... win elections if you want to have a say so" stance but in order to win elections, there needs to be a fair playground without overly gerrymandered maps, etc.

The John Roberts court is trying to have his cake & eat it too. He's trying to look credible like they care about the rule of law, Democracy, etc. but in the end they are bought and sold just like every other right wing political power structure in this country that are trying to ensure that rich white people will maintain control of this country for another century.

 

Unfortunately, I think this is what will happen...

 

Well he also upheld gerrymandering which I think is a far bigger issue.

 

What is clear is that we can't rely on the executive branch to protect America's democracy, and now we can't rely on the judicial branch to protect America's democracy. So along with turning out the president we need to flip the Senate. Then we can work towards a new Voters Rights Amendment that eliminates gerrymandering and voter suppression.

 

They just said that the constitution (as its written today) doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering. That's basically it. Kagan even said in her dissent that the ruling is built around the notion that the Constitution has no prohibition on this but Congress could pass a law tomorrow prohibiting it.

Basically, the only hope is Democrats gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency and passing laws to prohibit this sort of thing because the Court ruled that the Constitution doesn't protect us against this sort of thing. The crux of any argument around voting has rested the 14th amendment which the court effectively ruled out in this instance.

The example of Congressional regulation is the Voting Rights Act which sets up rules to stop racial gerrymanders. Congress needs to pass an equivalent law that provides rules and procedure around partisan gerrymandering as well.

With that said, I'm reasonably certain that appointed senators and representatives would violate the VRA and the 14th amendment in some form. There are still some rules in place around voting rights. We just don't have very many rules around redistricting anymore.

 

I think Dem states such as California, NY, WA, OR, etc. would be stupid to not follow suit here to solidify their electoral maps. You might not like that these Dem states might be "rigged" for blue voters moving forward (assuming they are smart), but in order for our democracy to have any balance moving forward this is a MUST.

You might hate Democrats with all your heart, but anyone who doesn't want an autocracy & believes in Democracy in any sense should agree with me here.

However, I get the sense from the way Trumpers here view Democracy here that the consensus with Trumpers who are the majority of the Republican voters now see that autocracy & minority dictatorial rule is what they want now to solidify their power moving forward for generations. They see a window to get that achieved, and they generally believe those who don't look like them should not have the same rights and power that they have.

 

That is essentially what I was commenting on. Did you read what I said? I see the census ruling, and the gerrymandering ruling in the same vein. The court will not stand in your way if you want to game the system as long as your can argue your case with some level of competence.

Also- You can make the argument that the Census question issue has already done damage in suppressing responses by simply being threatened in the courts. The main purpose of this question is to strike fear in immigrants. I think the sentiment still carries even if the question cannot get added by 2020.

But yeah Dems are screwed in the short term with the redrawing of districts like the bullcrap districts we have to deal with here in Texas. This is John Roberts saying "all is fair in love and US politics... as long as Republicans do it credibly". As I mentioned in my prior post, Dem controlled states now have no choice but to gerrymander the sh$% out of their states to maintain some level of balance in our country.

 

Those two cases aren't the same. The Census case boiled down to the fact that while a majority of the court thought that the government was basically lying about its justification for the Census question, there wasn't a majority that was willing to directly rule that the government's Census question was arbitrary and capricious. So its now being remanded to the district court to consider new evidence. In Roberts's ruling on the Census, he explicitly called out that the Court has a role in reviewing the intent of an agency ruling under the APA. The difference was that Roberts was willing to give the government a second chance to explain why they added the Census question (even though Roberts acknowledged that the government's justification was false) while the liberals were ready to flat out prohibit the government from adding the Census question. But its important to note that Roberts agreed that the government wasn't being honest in its justification. So he wasn't exactly giving them a free pass.

The gerrymandering case was a ruling on the constitutionality of partisan redistricting and yes in that case, Roberts quit stalling (like he has in past cases) and just said that the court won't rule on partisan redistricting.

Bottom line, is that those are two very different outcomes. In the Census case, a majority of the court didn't believe the government and wasn't ready to just give deference to them while in the partisan redistricting cases, they finally said that they won't stop partisan redistricting (barring some new Congressional regulations that prohibit partisan redistricting).

 

They will know who is in the country. The census counts every resident.