This case and the sister case, Lamone v. Benisek, are set to be decided this month. Both raise the issue of whether partisan gerrymandering is prohibited. The SCOTUS Blog page and actual questions presented are:
[ol]
[li]Whether plaintiffs have standing to press their partisan gerrymandering claims;[/li][li]Whether plaintiffs’ partisan gerrymandering claims are justiciable;[/li][li]Whether North Carolina’s 2016 congressional map is, in fact, an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.[/li][/ol]
I think the answers are going to be No, No - not based on evidence presented, and No. In previous iterations of these questions, the court’s liberal justices have been in favor of getting involved in partisan gerrymandering, and I don’t see their views changing on this matter. Questions during oral arguments seem to indicate conservatives taking the status quo and not interceding.
I’ll predict that the Republican justices will win, which is generally my default prediction for SCOTUS cases these days. There’s 5 of them, after all. Maybe very occasionally one of them votes against the Republican consensus, but that’s rare enough to be notable each time it happens, and this case is significant enough (and potentially dangerous enough to Republican politics) that I think it’s very unlikely to be one of them.
I am not shocked because I agree with the majority that the issue is non-justiciable. Trying to decide exactly how much partisanship in drawing districts is too much is not subject to easily discoverable and manageable standards (Baker v. Carr). It’s a classic case of the maxim that not everything that is bad is unconstitutional.
Poof…done. No muss, no fuss. Hit enter on the computer and done.
The question is why wouldn’t the frigging Supreme Court of the US want to see the FFs vision come true. Not a vision of factions tilting the scales but a vision of one man, one vote.
Oh…right…Originalism is only when it suits them.
I was always shocked at the mayhem Baker v. Carr caused. It was a no-brainer yet it destroyed two men and took the court to the brink.
As an aside, if anyone wants a good run down of Baker v. Carr the podcast More Perfect did a good episode on this (link in the quote below). I think that podcast went waaay downhill but this is when they were good and the drama of this real life case is fascinating.
IANAL, let alone a SCOTUS justice, but I can’t see how they can just say “this is an issue for voters to decide” when the very issue is that the practice *prevents *voters from deciding.
And I don’t buy that it’s only because gerrymandering helps Republicans. I live in Illinois, where it’s a huge boon to Democrats.
But they also nixed the census citizenship question, which would have helped Republicans, too. Call me a Pollyanna, but I simply don’t believe SCOTUS justices can be that blindly partisan.
He is reliably conservative but I think he has a sense of how history will judge him and he cares about that so…rarely…he will oppose some egregious decision.
Very, very rarely but I really think he cares how he will be perceived in history books (i.e. his legacy).
Alito and Thomas couldn’t give a shit about that. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are still question marks.
But you seem to be contradicting yourself there - on one hand you posit that their finding makes no logical fucking sense (which it doesn’t, for exactly the reason you put forward) ; yet on the other hand you nix the idea that they could have reached this absurd reasoning due to partisanship. But what else is there ? Would you rather believe they’re just dummies ?
It’s not quite that simple, due to population concentrations and geographical repartitions and so on. To put it simply, and stereotypically, if for generations Foo voters have been pushed towards or confined within a given zone via various socio-economic pressures, and even though they represent 50% of the total population they are only really present in 10% of a given geographical area, then a blind algorithm will give disproportionate weight to Non-Yellow voters (depending on the exact mechanics of the vote).
And by Foo I of course mean non-white.
That part threw me too. How the fuck are legislatures going to decide gerrymandering when the legislature has been gerrymandered to not represent the will of the people?
In Wisconsin the democrats won statewide election by a huge margin but lost the state assembly due to gerrymandering. Its an idiotic decision.
This is why democrats need to gerrymander the fuck out of every state they can. That way at least 1 conservative SCOTUS judge will join the 4 leftward judges to oveturn it.
As long as gerrymandering only benefits the GOP and harms the democrats, the 5 GOP justices will support it.
I guess I’d rather believe there are actual legal principles I don’t fully understand. Why they deserve the benefit of the doubt is beginning to escape me, however.
Sorry but no; they did not “nix the citizenship question”. They remanded it due to evidence which conflicts with sworn testimony. Absent that apparent contradiction, the question would have been okay.
