republican gerrymandering

Maybe they could make a multi-state pact like they've done for obviating the Electoral College. Make anti-gerrymandering rules that signatories will implement if and when enough other states also agree to do it.

 

I like how the Democrats are showing how blatantly wrong it is in order to get the attention to this that it desperately needs. The only way to get Republicans to enact change is if they think it'll also negatively affect them as well.

 

If the only way to end gerrymandering is to frame it in a way that suggests Democrats are the problem, so be it. If that's the only way for the GOP to support ending it, so be it.

I don't care. Just end it.

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/592792-hochul-signs-new-york-congressional-map-into-law

Hochul signs New York congressional map into law
BY OLAFIMIHAN OSHIN - 02/03/22 10:46 PM EST

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) on Thursday signed into law a new congressional map that would give Democrats a more significant political advantage over Republicans, The Associated Press reported.

New York’s state legislature passed the map, which could help Democrats flip as many as three House seats, on Wednesday.

While New York is slated to lose a congressional seat as a result of population decline, the map favors Democrats in 22 House districts and Republicans in four. New York's congressional delegation is currently made up of 19 Democrats and eight Republicans.

Republicans have criticized the map, which was proposed by New York Democrats after the state's bipartisan redistricting commission was unable to come up with new congressional lines, saying it is an attempt by Democrats to keep their majority in the House come November as Republicans appear set to regain control of the chamber.

Republicans have said they are considering mounting legal challenges against the map, which they argue violates the state constitution, according to the AP.

New York’s Democratic leadership, meanwhile, has said that the new map reflects the state’s population shifts over the last decade.

New York’s midterm election primaries are scheduled to take place in June, the AP noted.

​

yep

 

NYT had a good article today about how bad gerrymandering is getting by both parties. Not only is it creating safe partisan seats but it is driving both parties to become more ideologically extreme has candidates have to worry more about a primary challenge from the Left or the Right than from the other party. It's also making it harder to address many problems such as reforming social security or addressing spending.

One interesting take from the article though is that Democrat chances might not be as bad as perceived because of Democrat states gerrymandering.

Posting some highlights from the piece for those who can't get past the pay wall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/us/politics/redistricting-competition-midterms.html
‘Taking the Voters Out of the Equation’: How the Parties Are Killing Competition
The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.

WASHINGTON — The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.

With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.

While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the American political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process.
...
But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans.

That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.
...
Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within.

“When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.”

Mr. Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Mr. Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing.
...
“The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Representative Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.”
...
No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one.
...
Democrats did the same where they could. Oregon legislators took the state’s competitive Fourth District and turned it into a seat that strongly favors their party.

The change was so dramatic that Representative Peter DeFazio, an 18-term Democrat, told reporters last year that he chose to retire because the district is now “winnable by another Democrat.”
...
A lack of competition has unintended consequences. Without a competitive race at the congressional level, local parties are deprived of an infusion of money and organizing. Candidates for governor or Senate don’t benefit from being able to piggyback on the energy and activity at the local level.
...
It can sometimes take years to see the full impact of eliminating a competitive district.

Ten years ago, North Carolina Republicans took a battleground district in the state’s western tip and, by slicing off a piece of the liberal city of Asheville, turned it into a district that John McCain would have carried by 18 points in the 2008 presidential election. The incumbent centrist Democrat, Heath Shuler, retired rather than seek re-election in a district he had little shot at winning.

He was replaced by Mark Meadows, who went on to be a founding member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus before becoming the last White House chief of staff for Mr. Trump and a central figure in Mr. Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

 

Another article today from the NYT points out how state supreme courts are pushing back on some of these extreme redistricting maps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/north-carolina-redistricting-gerrymander-unconstitutional.html
North Carolina Court Says G.O.P. Political Maps Violate State Constitution
The State Supreme Court said maps of the state’s 14 House districts and state legislative districts violated guarantees of free elections, speech and assembly.

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday upended Republican efforts to lock in political dominance in the state, saying that congressional and state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution.

The ruling requires the Republican-controlled legislature not only to submit new maps to the court, but to offer a range of statistical analyses to show “a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats” in elections.

The requirement rebuffed the argument against redrawing the maps that the legislature offered in oral arguments before the court this week: that the court had no right to say whether and when political maps cross the line from acceptable partisanship into unfairness.

The justices’ 4-3 decision, split along party lines, not only sets a precedent for judging the legality of future maps in the state, but could play an important role in the struggle for control of the House of Representatives in elections this November. The Republican-drawn maps had effectively allotted the party control of at least 10 of the 14 House seats the state will have in the next Congress, even though voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.

It was a challenge to earlier partisan maps in North Carolina and Maryland that led the U.S. Supreme Court to end decades of federal debate over the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders, ruling in 2019 that they were political issues beyond its jurisdiction. The justices said then that Congress and state courts should rule on the question, and lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case said on Friday that the new ruling carried out that mandate to the letter.

“The U.S. Supreme Court said it’s up to state courts to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and that’s exactly what the North Carolina Supreme Court has done,” said Elisabeth Theodore of the law firm Arnold & Porter. “The court’s direction is clear: The General Assembly must stop cheating and draw fair new maps so that North Carolinians can have a fair say in who governs them.”

The decision comes as both federal and state courts have lately proved a bulwark against some excessive gerrymanders. A state court in Ohio rejected maps drawn by Republicans in the state legislature last month as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, and a federal court in Alabama ruled last month that Republicans had to redraw their congressional map to create a second district that gave minorities a fair shot at electing their preferred candidate.

The legal decisions have been a boon for Democrats, who started the latest redistricting cycle at a significant disadvantage. Republicans controlled the map-drawing process in 187 congressional districts, while Democrats were able to draw 75 districts.

The court decisions in North Carolina, Ohio and Alabama all forced Republicans back to the drawing table and are likely to result in either more competitive seats or opportunities for Democrats in the midterm elections.

The 2019 Supreme Court decision on partisan gerrymandering has led opponents of partisan maps to take their arguments from federal courts to the state benches, where constitutions often give more legal protections to voters. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave them an important victory in 2018, striking down Republican-drawn maps that the justices said violated the State Constitution.

In the North Carolina case, a lower court said last month that even though the state and congressional maps were extreme partisan gerrymanders by any measure, the State Constitution nevertheless did not outlaw them.

But the State Supreme Court built on the Pennsylvania ruling in its opinion on Friday, saying the maps violated “beyond a reasonable doubt” the state’s guarantees of free speech, free assembly, free elections and equal protection under the law.

“The General Assembly violates the North Carolina Constitution when it deprives a voter of his or her right to substantially equal voting power on the basis of partisan affiliation,” the ruling stated. A political map that “diminishes or dilutes a voter’s opportunity to aggregate with like-minded voters,” the justices said, “unconstitutionally infringes on that voter’s fundamental right to vote.”

But although the ruling cited “multiple reliable ways” of deciding when a gerrymandered map has crossed the line into unacceptable partisanship, it did not satisfy the legislators’ demand for a bright line showing when that line was crossed. Instead, it stated that a political map would be presumed constitutional if “some combination of these metrics demonstrates there is a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity” to elect candidates.

Republicans on the court, led by Chief Justice Paul Newby, argued that was dodging the question. By giving the court political powers that only the state legislature or voters could exercise, he wrote, the majority on the court “tosses judicial restraint aside, seizing this opportunity to advance its agenda.”

 

Sorry missed you post and just posted the same thing from NYT.

 

Garbage "both sides" framing that is always prevalent in the times

One side has repeatedly fought gerrymandered districts in court. One side fights for independent commissions at the state level. One side tries to push the envelope in terms of RCV, PR elimination of the EC, and generally tries to make voting more representative.

The other side opposes all these things and has their legislators in robes with majority leader John Roberts (R-Md) to enforce as much gerrymandering as humanly possible. I mean quite literally even explicitly racist gerrymanders are ok with those guys

This isn't even an argument about intent, its literally 20 years worth of action.

And of course none of it is mentioned because the Times gotta "but her emails" this too.

 

While I agree that Republicans are much worse on this this is a problem that cuts across the political spectrum and the sooner people on each side of the political divide realize that the better chance it will be to resolve it.

The problem is that most partisans view things as a zero sum game and that any move based on pure principle will come at a cost to their own side. Any cost to our side will be seen as a weakness that will just be exploited by the other side.

 

who decides the criteria for fairness?

is it racial makeup? D-R composition? Geographic "squareness"?

 

What language in the constitution forbids hyperpartisan gerrymanding? What is the threshold for when district lines are too hyperpartisan? Who decides that threshold?

If voters don't want their state legislatures to draw lines, they can amend their state constitutions to that effect, but it's not obvious that would result in a "fairer" outcome.