This is actually a fascinating read, despite the disappointing decision.
This section really resonates:
> It is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context. It may mean achieving a greater number of competitive districts by undoing packing and cracking so that supporters of the disadvantaged party have a better shot at electing their preferred
candidates. But it could mean engaging in cracking and packing to
ensure each party its “appropriate” share of “safe” seats. Or perhaps
it should be measured by adherence to “traditional” districting criteria. Deciding among those different visions of fairness poses basic
questions that are political, not legal. There are no legal standards
discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments. And it is
only after determining how to define fairness that one can even begin
to answer the determinative question: “How much is too much?”
"It is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context."
Except it IS clear what unfairness looks like, and it's this.
“How much is too much?”
This, what they are doing right hear right now, this is too much. I have to assume it's obvious to the majority here and they know what they're doing.
Kagan's dissent is great and finishes with this which REALLY resonates with me:
"Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the
law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in
these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the
Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations.
None is more important than free and fair elections. With
respect but deep sadness, I dissent. "
I think the decisions' example is pretty telling. Does every voter have a right to a competitive election in their district, so that their vote matters at least potentially? Or does every voter have a right to their political party getting representation at least approximately equal to their share of the electorate? Those two both sound good, and they point in opposite directions.
So, it's not a question of what the law says, it's a question of _values_, of what the law _should_ say. You could argue either side of that, but saying that the Constitution or precedents give a clear guideline for a judge to use in deciding it, is not tenable.
Let's say the courts decided to intervene here. What standard should they give? "If it seems really unfair, strike it down?" What looks really unfair to a Democratic-appointed judge is going to be different than what looks really unfair to a Republican-appointed judge.
Except that courts do weigh get asked to weigh in murky situations and come out with a ruling all the time, which is the reason they exist.
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said recently, "However one comes out on the legal issues, partisan gerrymandering unsettles the fundamental premise that people elect their representatives, not vice versa."
No, the reason they exist is to rule on what the law says, even in very murky situations. But I have read no credible case that there is any statement in the Constitution or elsewhere, which they could go by to determine the standard here.
The fact that RGB says "However one comes out on the legal issues..." looks like evidence that, at some level, she knows there's not a legal argument here to arrive at the right result. Because the right result is surely to not do things the way we do now. Probably, some kind of multi-rep district system is the right solution. But, that's not a thing the courts can fix, or should attempt to, and they know it.
> Does every voter have a right to a competitive election in their district, so that their vote matters at least potentially? Or does every voter have a right to their political party getting representation at least approximately equal to their share of the electorate? Those two both sound good, and they point in opposite directions.
No, they don't, unless you view sigle-member districts as mandatory; the fact that sigle-member districts (or, rather, any winner-take-all districts in states with more than a single seat) make essential elements of fairness incompatible reveals that such districts are problematic, sure.
> Except it IS clear what unfairness looks like, and it's this.
That’s not sufficient. You need to be able to also identify what districting maps are fair enough. As soon as you open the door to these kinds of lawsuits, every districting map will get challenged in court by the minority party. If you don’t have a standard for being able to throw out most of those cases, you’ll have the federal judiciary deeply enmeshed in redistricting disputes.
“We’ll only have the judiciary step in for the the most egregious cases” never works. You see that in contexts like Establishment Clause litigation, where people are suing over whether letting religious student organizations use school facilities is an establishment clause violation. In that area, legitimately egregious conduct is long in the past (if it ever existed at scale) and courts have become just another political tool in the culture war. There is a reason the Supreme Court has resisted the urge to take a “we’ll step in only for the most egregious cases” approach with the First Amendment. Video games marketed to kids where you blow away prostitutes? Go for it. We’re not going to police that.
You can’t get judges to police everything. If duly elected Democrats in maryland want to screw over republicans and strip them of voting rights, then there are problems with our society judges can’t fix.
The only thing I can think of is to start with the districts we have and then produce an algorithm that uses a random number generator to redraw lines. The algorithm can fuzz the current boundaries making a district larger or smaller or it can choose to split a district or combine two districts. Just keep randomizing the districting for each election starting with the output of the last time it was randomly fuzzed.
Sometimes the randomness will work in favor of one party, sometimes against it. In the long term, it adds in some non-partisan non-determinism, which is probably good for justice long-term.
> That’s not sufficient. You need to be able to also identify what districting maps are fair enough.
Actually no. The court only needs to find that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, and then leave it up to the states and lower courts to figure out which kinds of map drawing is constitutional.
It's already not legal to have districts that don't represent the same number of people. E.g.
There's a reasonable back and forth between the majority and minority on this question. The majority rejects unilaterally expanding the set of criteria the courts can use to overturn political maps. There's a good separation-of-powers argument for that conservatism.
(The court would prefer another branch decide what is and isn't too partisan, in the way Congress defined what is illegal racial gerrymandering.)
I'm reading this as both sides agreeing that it's unfair, but the majority doesn't see a way for the Supreme Court to devise a fair test to apply as they can with race, or a way to do so under the Constitution.
I'm inclined to agree with the majority. I don't see a solution for this problem that isn't a messy and partially flawed political compromise, and those need to come from the States or Congress.
They've made the assumptions that districts are required and stopped because they can't see a fairness test.
The fairest thing to do would be to eliminate districts and allow a voter to identify which candidate(s) they support. That offers the voter the ability to self select fair representation of the interests that matter to them. Yes, this does imply an alternative voting method.
> The fairest thing to do would be to eliminate districts and allow a voter to identify which candidate(s) they support
There's a very old assumption that local elections (i.e. within a district) are the fairest way for the interests of the people to be represented. Politics ought to be as decentralized as possible - all the arguments, discussions, and decisions about "what we want" should take place locally when electing a representative.
While your proposal may help governments to more accurately represent the will of the people en masse or in aggregate, I suspect it would only further contribute to a sense of division, especially in a local sense.
I'd prefer that change to come from the people... but yes, I'm proposing a solution, not something that I expect justices to suddenly will in to being.
I'm wondering, if the majority came to the conclusion that it's another branches' (or the states') problem to address, why did the court take on this case other than to state #1 "It's not our branches problem." and #2 "Courts shouldn't be addressing this issue, see #1." That's a full on punt without forcing anyone to address the issue like this is a problem but not ours to fix.
The court initially gained the power of judicial review under Marbury vs Madison. SCotUS can standardize the application of the law by interpreting it or the constitution in a specific way like ruling that the "Well regulate militia," part of the 2A is less important than "the right to bear arms" part. The court has used this power before to step in when other branches or states could not agree or even work together like desegregating public schools (Brown V Board of Education, unanimous decision). I think we are at a similar point with gerrymandering. Some states benefit from it and the people in power want/need it to stay in place so like term limits won't be considered at all until the power balance flips. But the power balance can't flip due to gerrymandering. SCotUS won't put their finger on the other side of the scale to force that change and address the issue either.
I'm wondering how much the decision gets into one person, one vote doctrine. Districts within a state must have similar population and voting power. If a district is designed to favor a specific party they could hold such partisan gerrymandering makes voters of the opposite party's vote effectively not count and violate One Person, One Vote precedent. It may then be held that districts should be drawn in a way that doesn't involve partisan lean along with other protected classes like race or sex. The hard part isn't the decision itself but how the majority opinion lays out or sets up what comes next. I think that's where the court couldn't agree and why we have such a milquetoast rejection of the branches power to do something.
If they couldn't agree how to rank districts on partisan bias (say with the efficiency gap), where the line is drawn for gerrymandering (if it's 60%, then they'll be drawn to 59.99% next time etc), or how to advise redrawing without stepping on states rights to determine how voting works (the constitution lays out a few requirements but leaves much to each state to decide), then this decision makes sense. But they probably could have sorted that out when considering to take the case at all. Maybe they needed to take the case due to the mess of initial decisions in lower courts as it would come up again and they wanted to get ahead of that.
I'm reading this as a punt but hard pass on making anyone responsible for the problem. I think you're right though as if the vote went the other way fallout would be messy, possibly get the court called out for activism (I think we needed it here but that's my opinion), and not consider possible responses that make the problem worse or legal arguments like if gerrymandering for party isn't valid like for race then party affiliation is a protected class.
After typing this out, I think they could have rejected the case with minor fallout with notes that it needs to be handled by the proper branch of government like Congress or the states. But they accepted the case then couldn't sort out how a ruling against partisan gerrymandering would work or fallout, and here we are.
> But they accepted the case then couldn't sort out how a ruling against partisan gerrymandering would work or fallout, and here we are.
I like your line of thinking there, but I can't help but think they knew exactly what they were doing when they took it. Knowing what we know about Alito and Thomas they would've jumped at this type of decision, probably Gorsuch and Kav as well.
Make a binding non-decision that favors the status quo? That sounds in line traditional conservative goals of preserving the status quo while doing the bare minimum to govern a la small government.
I think accepting the case and establishing precedence that is it not the role of the court to solve this problem is better than letting it fester.
California was gerrymandered to the extreme and it took two ballots directly to the people to move to an independent commission, the last only in 2010. Both were opposed by lawmakers, so it’ll be slow going state by state.
I think such a commission is good. Any effort that better demonstrates the will of the voters like registration drives, mail-in options, etc is worth considering given other costs are adequate. As far as I've seen the CA commission is working as intended or at least better than before. I'm not for any groups, political or otherwise, getting any greater or lesser representation. It pushed me to want a more parliamentary system sometimes like vote for party or IRV for elections with specific candidates.
The issue is that “fairness” has many dimensions. Representation is one of them, but so is racial fairness (e.g. you can’t split districts to deemphasize one race’s vote) and compactness (you shouldn’t make thin slices geographically to see read the vote.) When you have these two competing values, and some maps do better on one dimension while others are better on the other, how do you properly weigh them?
My understanding of the ruling is not that it’s ok to be fair, but that at this point we can’t even balance all the dimensions of fairness to get a single measure.
Had the court back then decided that since they couldn't define it they couldn't pass laws on it, I think our laws in relation to such material would be in a better place now.
A deterministic algorithm that accepts no inputs other than the census count and geodetic coordinates of the census tract, and outputs district boundaries, is inherently non-unfair.
If you cannot inject unfairness during the process, the only unfairness you can output is a different expression of the unfairness that already existed when you started it. You can't intentionally make it worse.
I have personally seen dozens of algorithmic redistricting proposals that naively optimize for "geographic compactness". Those maps look fair. But you don't need to use the interocular test--you can use math and produce an objective measure of compactness. The only question is which one to pick.
Pick any of them, arbitrarily. It will set an upper limit on the impact of malicious gerrymandering, and be more fair than when completely unconstrained.
Yes I always love reading these. Despite all the recent politicking around the SC, I think it remains the least political branch of our government.
Many people think the SC's job is to decide what is "good" for our country, but actually that is the Legislative's job. The SC's job is to interpret the law and apply it fairly. The opinion actually says that gerrymandering can reasonably be argued to be unfair, but just that deciding that is IS unfair is not within the realm of the federal courts.
The opinion is well written and I think it was correctly decided. That being said, I do think Gerrymandering is a real problem, but I think it needs to be solved with new laws, not with a SC decision.
I think the Supreme Court is the most political body in US. Ideology is at the core of every decision where the executive and legislative bodies have a much wider focus. Politics without elections removes the polite fiction created as everyone tries to look good to the general public.
fivethirtyeight.com did a really insightful series of podcasts on gerrymandering. Everyone agrees what North Carolina is doing is bad, but it's actually quite difficult to say what "good" is. Definitely worth a listen:
Hmm. That is actually an interesting argument. It's like when Žižek and Peterson were debating Capitalism and Peterson talked about how you have the separation between those with wealth and the workers, but what happens when you try to fix that? Trying to level out the field will eventually lead to other injustice based on your previous position in the system.
Gerrymandering is a symptom of a broken system: badly proportionate representation due to First Past the Post elections. If we had order of preference voting with instance runoff, or Mixed-Member Proportional, policies would be much better at reflecting the opinions held by the people in the regions where politicians are elected. (I did a post on this a few years back: https://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differe...)
Maine has ranked voting now, and I hope we see it in more states. I think the solution to our broken political system is not fixing district lines, but to move to voting systems where those lines don't matter, where votes cannot be thrown away and where elected officials come into power representing many different viewpoints of their electorate.
Those two things (how to perform districting and how to count votes) are completely unrelated and separate problems.
If you keep your heavily partisan districts, ranked choice isn't going to fix things if you've used data to ensure that the people in that districts are likely to vote the way you want. Ranked choice (or similar changes) doesn't create a more balanced partisan body in the district, it just changes the need for a Primary to decide who will be represented.
Districts matter because they're baked into the system. You want to get rid of them, that's a whole other can of worms but you can't pretend that drawing 3 districts, one with a +20% conservative lean, the other with a +20% conservative lean and the 3rd with a +90% liberal lean isn't going to continue being a problem.
Your plan is great at fracturing the parties, but that assumes that there's any value in that.
It's also worth noting that districts useful, just not when heavily partisan. For example, if you have a city that is 51+% white, and all your council elections are at large, it is entirely possible for white voters, as a bloc, to just overrule the other 49% all the time.
This is less probable with districts because in general races are not well-mixed in American cities in terms of spatial distribution.
Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, just ruled that the US is not a representational democracy
> In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that partisan-gerrymandering claims pose particularly difficult problems for courts because it is well settled that legislatures can consider politics when drawing district maps. The question that courts would have to decide is when the consideration of politics has gone too far and violates the Constitution.
> But there’s no requirement, Roberts wrote, that a party’s representation in a congressional delegation or state legislature reflect its share of the statewide vote – a concept known as proportional representation.
Gerrymandering is enabled by data collection and algorithms that were once impractical to implement. In declining to take up the issue of gerrymandering in the previous Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy identified this issue.
As reported by NPR [0]:
> "Technology is both a threat and a promise," he wrote, noting that with the advent of computer technology, the temptation to leverage partisan advantage would "only grow" unless constrained by the courts. His hope, he wrote, was that "new technologies may produce new methods of analysis" for the courts to use in identifying and remedying the problem.
So. Let's talk about ethics. This is a community that sees the issue, understands the subtle ways in which data and algorithms can be manipulated to systematically disenfranchise people, and has the power to create the tools that Justice Kennedy wrote about. This is also a community that has the power to resist -- to not let its expertise and skills fall under the employ of those that would harm democracy.
It might be helpful, if there were publicly available algorithms that could balance the various aims (competitive districts, compact districts, majority-minority districts, etc.) for a given set of geography and census data. That would enable legislators to at least say, in legislation, that algorithm such-and-such (publicly defined and available) will be used with such-and-such inputs (e.g. 1/3 competitive districts, majority-minority for any minority of at least 9% of the overall pop, etc.). Right now, the legislators would have to specify the algorithm themselves, or else specify a proprietary code business product, which seems icky. So, I suppose the dev community could make the tools for drawing maps available, and educate legislators in their use.
The fact that Roberts actually wrote this without his head exploding is astounding: "Vote dilution in the one-person, one-vote cases refers to the idea that each vote must carry equal weight. That requirement does not extend to political parties; it does not mean that
each party must be influential in proportion to the number of its supporters."
How can each vote carry equal weight if 60% of the voters get to select 30% of the elected officials?
Because a voter's preference cannot be expressed solely through their affiliation with a political party.
We look at gerrymandering through the lens of "fairness", and we find it unfair when one group cannot get reasonably proportional representation in the legislature. But we are all members of many groups. We belong to political parties, racial groups, regional groups, economic groups, social classes and personality groups -- how can all of them get a voice which is proportional to their numbers? There's no clear-cut solution.
This is the core problem with most gerrymandering jurisprudence -- it looks at at the problem mostly through a racial lens, and more recently, a partisan one. But the world is more complex than that. Voter's interests are not solely determined by the color of their skin or their political party.
The court is not saying that gerrymandering is okay. The court is saying that they don't have a solution, or at least not one that can be imposed by courts. The court is more constrained than a legislature in finding a solution, because the court must override state laws based on a reasonable reading of federal law, in this case the Voting Rights Act, or the Constitution. And unfortunately, both of those sources are nearly silent on the matter. It is not within the courts power to create law from nothing, notwithstanding Kagan's dissent.
In the past, we decided that the appropriate grouping for the election of representatives was geographic. It's not ideal, but it's the best of bad options. Our current gerrymanders are a perversion of that principle, and we are right to look for a solution that leads to cleaner, more compact districts.
The court has said that it's not theirs to decide the issue. I'm not sure I agree, because current gerrymanders are an incumbent protection racket, and that looks to me like a civil rights violation. But in any case, it is well within the power of Congress to fix the problem through an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, and they certainly should.
"It is well within the power of Congress to fix the problem..."
Except that the Senate is controlled by Republicans and Republicans, on the whole, benefit more from gerrymandering. Even when the words and intentions of GOP are made clear, "we gerrymandered black peoples' districts to reduce their representation", it's still hard to remove that entrenched power. What's more, because of the pro-rural bias of the Senate, the rural allegiance to the GOP, and the electoral college disadvantaging urban centers, this entrenched GOP will continue to have a disproportionate share of power.
The Democrats try to play clean and fair, meanwhile the deck is stacked against them, and they still naively don't shift back towards gaining rural voters who they need for the Senate. Until the Fox News loving Silent Gen and Boomers die off, the GOP will cling to a disproportionate share of power.
I was involved in a gerrymandering case in the 1990s. The group that brought me in was challenging the Illinois congressional map, which had been drawn by Democrats. It was, and is, atrocious. Back then, the map was a deal between the white Democrats who wanted to hold some white seats that extended into the suburbs, and some black Democrats who wanted incumbent protection.
Back then, the Democrats were the ones across the country who were protecting racial gerrymanders because they wanted to ensure that any area with a substantial black population was never represented by a Republican. They drew the districts in Illinois to ensure as many black-majority districts as possible (and one Hispanic-majority district). The districts were completely convoluted. They made arguments that the Voting Rights Act actually required racial gerrymanders.
Our side challenged the districts. The other side, defending the gerrymander, was led by the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, and they brought in the Clinton Administration Justice Department as defendant-intervenors. That's right -- the primary defender of gerrymanders was the Clinton Administration. They were involved in similar suits, making similar claims, across the country.
Demographics have shifted a bit since then, and now we have more Republican gerrymanders than Democrat ones. But make no mistake -- the original convoluted maps were all Democrat, and virtually all Supreme Court gerrymandering-related precedent during the era came as a result of Democrat defense of the maps.
So don't try to claim that Democrats "play clean and fair". That's rubbish. They created this problem, and only now are shifting their views of gerrymandering because it is no longer working to their benefit. They, like most politicians, are opportunists.
Disclosure: I'm now the chairman of the Chicago Republican Party.
Okay, you're chair of the Chicago Republicans. Chicago and Illinois, like my town of Providence, RI, was absolutely devastated by corruption amongst Democrats. We shouldn't ever have single-party control, that's not good for anyone.
What are your stances on climate change? If you have a sane, science-backed viewpoint, it'd be much easier for me to vote for you, given you're a GOP member. As it stands, 95% of your entire party has abandoned the planet's future, and I can not in good conscience vote for anyone who takes the GOP label and doesn't speak out against denialists and the fossil fuel cabal.
I went to UChicago, FWIW, and there are some decent economics-based policy proposals about climate change from right-wing thinkers. It's a shame your party is so beholden to fossil fuel interests.
I think Congress fails to properly police and regulate itself. I'm not sure what the answer is to that problem, but an unaddressed fundamental flaw of the Congressional system to me is that there is no incentive for them to even remotely approach changes that affect Congresspeople.
One cannot expect those that benefit from X to write laws restricting X. It's why money will never be out of politics. There will never be enough people in Congress to sacrificially agree to such an idea.
Because, by design, we don't have proportional representation. Even in a world without gerrymandering a small majority (say 55%) of voters evenly distributed can pick even 100% of elected officials.
> How can each vote carry equal weight if 60% of the voters get to select 30% of the elected officials?
Your vote is measured the same way as my vote. Your vote doesn't equal three-fifths of mine.
There is apparently not a Federal regulation on crafting districts such that they overall skew in a given direction. In practice this can and does result in your vote being effectively worthless if you are in a district that is not your particular flavor.
Depending on your philosophies, the judiciary is not tasked with legislation or "correcting wrongs" but with evaluating the current ruleset and determining if things are correct given those rules. So despite that you and I can look and say "well regardless of the letter of the law, the outcome surely isn't right" you have those that view this as not being in their power to change. The law legislates the way in which the vote is counted, not in the district-creation process.
One would assume this is how his head remains intact.
> That requirement does not extend to political parties
I think political parties are a non-entity as far as the US constitution (small 'c') is concerned, aren't they? So the court doesn't have any opinion on them and there are no requirements.
It's true, the Constitution was written without regard to parties, which I think is a huge failing, but one that could be remedied - if we didn't have partisan politics. But Supremes have created new law many times, both good and bad, and they should have this time as well. What will likely happen is people will challenge maps on other reasons, with no obvious likelihood of success. I have always felt that the rule for drawing a map should involve some kind of rational geometric principal, such as requiring the maps to have a minimal boundary length, making it mostly impossible to rig. But not very likely to ever happen sadly.
1. It would be harder to create such an independent commission in the US, because Americans (and especially Republicans) have worked tirelessly to make every corner of their lives another opportunity for partisanship. Americans elect _far_ too many officials, and those elections almost invariably end up partisan because a party has the muscle to win you the election. For example, in the US all those Supreme Court justices who wrote this decision and its dissents are in effect partisan, even though in principle it's not supposed to be a partisan body. In the UK the Supreme Court is just a bunch of judges that other judges and lawyers thought should be elevated, not a partisan issue.
2. Because Parliament is sovereign the Parliament has to actually enact those boundaries after the commission proposes them. Historically there is always a political party that thinks these changes are a bad idea conveniently for them because it somehow always seems to be the party that will likely lose seats. Because the Commission itself is impartial which party is angry about this varies, but in recent history it's Labour. When proposals to actually apply the current recommendations are coming up, I can always expect about one Facebook post a week from somebody who had no idea how boundaries work, or that there's an independent commission in charge of this, who has been convinced "somehow" that the party they don't like has conspired to take seats away from the one they do like via these boundary changes. Big surprise.
3. To be fair we got here because historically UK boundaries were left unchanged for so long that we had the Rotten Boroughs, a situation where some random land owner might own an area which was entitled to be represented by an MP even though literally _nobody_ had lived there for decades. You will not be surprised to learn that this caused _horrendous_ levels of corruption, bad enough that the act of parliament to fix it was routinely called the Great Reform Act (legally "Representation of the People Act 1832") and had to be rammed through by the same sort of extreme measures we've seen Democrats talking about in the US to fix its democracy.
If my understanding is correct, this is a misleading title. Federal courts cannot invalidate partisan gerrymandering - it's left to the individual states.
That is correct, I imagine he's arguing that each state should decide on how to setup it's districting vs the courts. It's already happened in a few states with independent redistricting setups (but mostly in blue/purple states) but it will be much harder in deep red states.
The particularly red/blue states are where this matters the most. Imagining a state with 10 districts and a split of 80-20 along party lines (and this is relatively as extreme red/blue you can get; americans aren't that homogenous). Ideally you'd expect that state to send and 8 - 2 split to the house of representatives to best represent their population. With gerrymandering it's trivial to insure those 20% are silenced as far as federal influence is concerned. That's a lot of people and, I would argue, not an ideal situation.
Note that if the people are literally just randomly red or blue like this in an 80:20 split across the state, it actually takes a LOT of work to ensure you get an 8:2 split of ten representatives out of that and you'd expect 10:0 instead if representatives are one-per-district.
One fix is to use multi-representative districts, e.g. you draw only two districts in that 10 member state, and in each district people are voting for _five_ representatives. If there are parties you can use this thing called the Jefferson system (yes named after that Jefferson) to pick members of parties to fill those five seats per district with a single vote per person in a fair way. We can expect that in this 80:20 scenario each district would send one minority party member and four majority party members. The way Jefferson works, getting five out of five members is going to need you to really _crush_ your opponents, because in effect for that last seat every vote helps them five times more than you - even "useless" votes like somebody who wrote in "Michelle Obama" make it harder for them to win that last seat.
In reality though things aren't that conveniently mixed. Most likely an 80:20 state has very different ratios in its big cities than in rural agricultural land, or on an Indian reservation, or between a college town and an otherwise similar town with no students. Gerrymandering is about drawing lines on a map so that say 40% of the people in one district are blue, even though it's 20% state wide, whereas maybe if you'd just "naturally" put the line around the big city it'd be 56% blue and they'd get a blue representative. This feels intuitively unfair, and it's frustrating that a Supreme Court felt able to say well, too bad, we don't "know" what fair even is.
Presidental and Senatorial, yes. For the House, those red districts in blue states and vice versa can help influence the majority.
At the state level, it depends on the number of districts. Some states are at large (one district) so it doesn't matter greatly, and on the other end of the spectrum you have places like Texas and Cali where there's so many districts that it would be hard to affect. But if you hit that sweets spot of like 2-5 districts (which represents 15 states) than the Map could have a huge effect on things.
For those who want a more in-depth look at gerrymandering and why it's not simply or easy to fix, I highly recommend this series from 538. They do a great job highlighting complicated wrinkles with common gerrymandering solutions and pointing out ideas you may not have previously thought.
Seems like at this point we need Congress to step in to address this. And given 1) they don't seem to want to work with each other at all at this point and 2) regardless of party this conflicts with their own interests I can't see much progress being made on this anytime soon.
“Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary. We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
This is one of those quotes that sounds great in the abstract but fails in any form of reality.
The chickens protest to the farmer that the fox is eating them. The farmer says, right but what can I do it's the fox eating you?
Everything is a political question...especially when you make it one.
The case in front of the courts was about redistricting being politicized. To use the fact that it is being politicized to claim you can't take action to protect people's fundamental right to effective representation is an embarrassing argument. It's willful ignorance towards a goal.
I just feel like this is another nail in the coffin that is trust in democracy in this country. You look at the stats on how much young people in the USA trust their political system and it just keeps falling for reasons like this.
Oh please vote... just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side. Oh and ya the electoral college will overwrite the vote of the majority. Democracy?
That's wrong, and wrong in really interesting ways.First off if we want to argue from the founders districts were never supposed to be more than 10k people and the number of districts would naturally grow with population. We threw that out the window in the early 20th century precisely to make the representation of power less democratic.
Ignoring all of that history, and taking your statement in good faith, it still is reductive to pretend that we're in the same state as the 18th century. Voters are much more diverse, and the technology exists to precisely draw districts to achieve very precise outcomes. The increased precision and ability to do things at scale is a differentiating factor, as well as the increased consequences; a voting population that's just "land owning white males" might see gerrymandering as less extreme that the much more diverse distribution of beliefs we have in the current voting population.
The current problems with gerrymandering are huge. Issues that have super majority support among the population (reproductive rights, immigration reform, drug reform, gun control) are controlled by an increasingly small population of voters. You can (and even may be correct) claim that this represents the wills of the founders; it's a much harder sell to claim that this is a "good thing" that the people shouldn't be able to push back against.
No, in the you're wrong unequivocally, but the ideas that we can "know the will of the founders" and "the will of the founders somehow matters" is really interesting in 2019.
I generally don't think we can, but since "gerrymandering" was coined to describe an instance of it occurring in Boston during the presidency of James Madison, I think we have a clear signal in this one case.
Your first two examples are questionable, because you don't define what "as understood by liberals" means.
* 50% believe abortion should be legal in any circumstances, plus 29% believe it should be legal in some. That's 79%, which is a supermajority.
* 30% believe immigration should be increased, plus 37% believe it should stay the same (though "same as what" is not clear). That's 67%, which is a supermajority.
Your third and fourth examples simply don't support your claim at all. 61% believe gun sales should be more limited, which by some definitions is already a supermajority. 66% believe marijuana should be legal, likewise.
You're just not representing the facts accurately. Even if you play around a bit with which answers represent a liberal view and what definition of supermajority should apply, you could just drop "super" and three out of four would be clear slam-dunks for your interlocutor. In context, the original claim about gerrymandering thwarting the will of the majority is clearly true according to your own data.
Precedent for its opposite also stretches all the way back to the founders. And before, both ways, lest we succumb to the hagiographic portrayal of the founders as supermen who came up with every idea in the constitution totally by themselves. As long as we interpret "political" vs. "legal" as really meaning judicial vs. congressional, this is not a bad argument, but precedent is not the decisive factor.
Also, remember that this is the same court in which three justices (Gorsuch/Thomas/Kavanaugh in Kisor and Thomas again in Gamble) have openly called for ignoring stare decisis when it doesn't suit their political objectives. For them to cite precedent and/or judicial humility in any decision at this point is dishonest.
People don't look for the founding intent because they think the founders were supermen. They do it because, at one point, the nation collectively agreed to be bound by the document the founders wrote. (I.e. I don't trust you and think your ideas are stupid, and I'm only willing to go along with them if I'm bound to and have no choice.)
If by "people" you mean judges and such then I think you're right. If "people" means people who post about political topics on the internet ... umm, not so much. It might not be used in legal arguments, but the belief in founders as saints or supermen is pretty widespread in US society generally.
I don't believe that the framers were supermen, but I also don't know that it's the Supreme Court that's meant to overturn the fundamental decisions the founders made.
> I also don't know that it's the Supreme Court that's meant to overturn
That's exactly the issue I was getting at. Equal representation is clearly a constitutional issue, which it is the court's duty to rule on, and yet the constitution does not explicitly address districting issues. Would defining a standard to determine whether a districting plan meets the constitutional requirement be within the court's purview? Clearly yes, because that kind of standard-setting is a significant part of what they have always done. It's right in the introduction to the Wikipedia list of landmark decisions.
Declining to set such a standard because such things are delegated to the states would have been reasonable. Declining to set such a standard because it's a "political" - i.e. legislative - responsibility is also reasonable. But "because the constitution" doesn't work because the constitution is mute on the specifics on which the court was asked to rule. They can't overturn what doesn't exist.
>"Gerrymandering," the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries so as to maximize partisan advantage, is far from new. Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor whose name literally became synonymous with the practice, worked his magic to create a salamander-shaped district over two hundred years ago.
The nail is not gerrymandering itself, but the fact that gerrymandering came before the court and they declined to do anything about it, with the vote following a super-obvious partisan line. That does erode public trust, compared to yesterday when people might still have had hope that the court would advance the cause of equal representation.
> I just feel like this is another nail in the coffin that is trust in democracy in this country. You look at the stats on how much young people in the USA trust their political system and it just keeps falling for reasons like this.
When you can't vote out your representatives through electoral means, what means remain?
> just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side
Overloaded districts just shift the debate from generals to primaries. I live in Manhattan. It will pretty much always vote blue. That doesn't mean there isn't political competition.
But that doesn't make sense. If the gerrymander is strong enough, running as a centrist in a heavily partisan district means you lose to the partisan (most of the time).
For that singular district the answer might mean color yourself purple, but if done correctly this allows for a party that represents a minority of voters to control things on a state or national level. It's the same problem people have with the electoral collage. You can win a majority of the votes (either by being a partisan or by being a centrist) and lose because maps.
Yes, the rules of the game suck and should be changed. As a citizen, there are many ways you can work towards that end. Regardless, the game is still being played and not voting is a move in the game that almost never benefits your own interests.
Do you know who got the most votes in the 2016 presidential election? It wasn't Trump. It wasn't Hillary, either. It was no one. The number of people who could have voted outnumbers the votes either candidate got.
People who stayed home chose to affect that election more than any other group of people.
Im not a fan of this line of thinking. This ignores the systemic reasons people might not be able to vote. Can you get time off of work, are the poll lines unreasonably long, are the polls close enough to you (you don't necessarily have a car), was your registration purged for reasons unknown (bigger than nonvoters is the population of people eligible to vote, but unregistered), did you just not register because of identification issues or bureaucratic nonsense?
Claiming that "people that choose to stay at home" are all independent of the system that effectively disenfranchises them is problematic.
We will do so if people show up and vote for candidates that care about that.
People like to claim both parties are the same, but look at how often Democratic politicians try to increase voting access and how often Republicans try to limit it. Their actions are telling you something.
> This ignores the systemic reasons people might not be able to vote.
It does not. Like I said, work to fix the systemic problems.
Also, go vote. These are not mutually exclusive actions.
There is a pernicious idea that not voting is a viable strategy to register your discontent or stick it to the man. This a nonsense belief perpetrated by people in power — especially Republicans — who want you to not vote. The fewer people who vote, the cheaper it is to influence enough people to swing an election.
Anyone who suggests its OK to not vote doesn't have your best interests at heart. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate things making it difficult to vote. Those are problems that should be fixed. In the meantime, vote.
When a party can use their gerrymandered position to block eligible voters from getting to the polls, then "Vote either way" is especially useful advice.
In North Carolina, the GOP used their ability to draw the districts in ways that allowed them to get a veto-proof super-majority in the state General Assembly. Then, they passed law after law restricting people's ability to get out and vote. Closing polling stations, requiring ID that many disadvantaged people don't have easy access to, restricting early voting. They even tried to make the state Election Board a completely partisan office by making it appointed solely by the General Assembly (which they controlled) rather than the Governor's office (who is a Democrat.)
All of that stopped once they lost their veto-proof majority, and they only lost it because the courts determined they had illegally drawn the districts. It wasn't people finally deciding to get out and vote. It was that people who had always been eligible to vote had their districts redrawn in a way that allowed their vote to actually count (albeit, barely.)
Indeed. As an anecdote, many of my left-leaning friends have become full-blown communists over the last few years. The political situation is likely going to get much much worse before it gets better.
How are you 99% sure? That sounds amazingly precise.
I would ask everyone to pause a minute before posting and ask if the comment adds substance to the discussion. If you have support for your argument, include it. If you use numbers, please back them up.
I think any reasonable / rational human being could use the single word "equality" as the criteria and decide unequivocally that what is being done with gerrymandering is not that.
Looks like SCOTUS needs congress to hold their hands and spell everything out in laws that will almost certainly contain loop holes.
Why is this supreme court unable (unwilling?) to think for themselves?
That should be federal courts, not state courts. This is important, because states like Pennsylvania have had its Supreme Court hand down rulings on gerrymandering because of its constitution.
I should note that this didn't go to the Supreme Court because it was purely a state matter, and ruled based on the state's constitution.
So what is the recourse to this decision to prevent partisan gerrymandering?
Basically what I am seeing is a class of laws that can be appealed at a state level, but not at a federal level. Not an expert on the legal system, but is there precedent for this on a constitutional topic (like voting)?
It seems inherently unfair, and maybe undemocratic that a party (any party) could control state government with a disproportionately small number of overall votes.
Or that any party could gather a large majority of votes, and not actually have any control.
Maybe the Supreme Court is not the right entity to decide this issue, but gerrymandering is obviously anti-democratic. By permitting it for political gain, the court allows our two dominant political parties to act as “kingmakers” by controlling the relative level of impact for each vote. With the sophistication of modern data collection and modeling, we’re increasingly seeing politicians win popular vote counts in state races while losing the election.
We need a wholesale reconsideration of our election fairness and security practices in this country.
The cognitive dissonance required to wax poetically about how voters should just get their representatives (elected and permanently in power because of these broken districts) to pass laws to redraw the broken districts is astounding to me. Checks and balances, never heard of them.
i can't wait to see what districts look like in a few years now that there's 0 potential for voters to be heard.
The thing is that there is potential for changes at the federal level to contradict this. If Congress is controlled by the Democrats, and they see many states with Republican-gerrymandered districts, they might see a way to increase their influence by legislatively preventing gerrymandering on the national level, forcing states to make their districts more fair.
There's of course always the chance that the party in power will see that preventing gerrymandering will hurt them more than it will help them, but that won't always be the case.
They can do it without passing a law actually (which is a bit scary if you think about it.) Congress and congress alone has the power to determine its membership. They can simply pass a resolution stating that no member who was elected by a district that was gerrymandered by some specific criteria will be seated in the future. The courts can go pound sand if they don't like it.
Yes, the court can make such claims as they do in Powell, and Congress can ignore them. It is pure power politics, but the reputation of the court has been so diminished that Congress could easily get away with refusing to seat a member or two and there is really nothing that anyone could do to stop them.
You can make that argument about anything, though and it be would be equally applicable. 'The branches of the US government can start ignoring each other'. Sure, they could but that possibility doesn't really offer any useful insight. It's like saying I can become world heavyweight boxing champion by shooting my opponents.
> How would they do that? Pass a law? Does the federal government have that authority?
Yes, at least for federal election districts. (The power is shared with the states, though.)
The crux of the SCOTUS decision is the court has no way to define fairness when it comes to drawing political boundaries. Congress passed a law banning gerrymandering using racial criteria, so courts can overrule maps on that basis. But Congress hasn't addressed partisan gerrymandering. The courts, rightfully in my opinion, after reading the SCOTUS opinion, are rejecting the right to unilaterally expand the set of criteria upon which they can reject political maps.
Gerrymandering backfires when voters change parties easily and frequently. Loosely held party loyalties keep politicians on their feet and forces them to focus on actual voter's issues.
When voters dogmatically lock-in to a party affiliation for decades/generations it leaves politicians with zero incentive to listen to them and shifts their focus to drawing safe-districts.
The best way for voters to be heard is to radically reject all party-lock-in-narratives and fire anyone who is in a safe seat - irrespective of everything else.
This needs to be stated more loudly and often. Reasonable people can disagree, and civility demands providing disputants with the benefit of the doubt, which is institutionalized in the courts. But when enough evidence of bad faith accumulates, a reluctance to acknowledge it is moral cowardice at best, cynical symbiosis at worst.
A good ruling. Everyone getting upset at this should take a couple things into consideration-
1. Both parties do this now and have done it historically. It is no more a danger today than it has ever been in the past and the Republic has lived and thrived with this system. Generally what it does it create a magnification of power for a party that is in a slight majority position, which can create more continuity in government and allow their ideas to make it into actual law over opposition. This is not a necessarily a bad thing. Voters get to see the full affects of a party's agenda take place and then if they don't like it, the party tends to get thrown out wholesale and the other 'team' ends up with similar magnification to implement their agenda. See Texas and California where this has played out in opposite directions in recent decades.
2. Modesty in the judiciary is a very good thing. Notice that the new 'ultra-conservative' judges have regularly been crossing over to join with the court liberals this term. Why? Because their underlying philosophy is to interpret the law and constitution as written. I appreciate here that they are calling out that the actions taken by the legislatures are not necessarily appropriate, but respecting the boundaries of what their constitutional role will often play to the advantage of those who disagree with this particular ruling. If they were true 'movement' conservatives dictating by desired outcome rather than the law, they could easily slip into a tyrannical mode from the POV of many here. Instead the worst you can say is that they are trying to enforce the law and Constitution as written and you can use your vote to get those changed.
Your argument about the magnification of power is interesting. I agree that gerrymandering tends in this direction. I’m not convinced this is (1) a healthy thing overall, (2) compatible with reasonable definitions of representation, nor (3) a particularly efficient way to give party or ideological continuity given the huge risks of corruption that come with gerrymandering.
I just think it is more like first past the post parliamentary government- the party in power gets to implement its agenda whether its a large majority or even a plurality. Not out of the norm around the world or considered anti-democratic.
You are missing the point when you say ‘It is no more a danger today than it has ever been in the past...’. With more detailed data and computation, the dangers of gerrymandering are more powerful than ever.
I would ask everyone to pause a minute before posting and ask if the comment adds substance to the discussion. If you have support for your argument, include it. If you use numbers, please back them up.
I'm not sure whether this is a good decision for the country, but it's a good decision for protecting the integrity of the federal judiciary (which is the whole point of the political question doctrine):
> In considering whether partisan gerrymandering claims are justiciable, we are mindful of Justice Kennedy’s counsel in Vieth: Any standard for resolving such claims must be grounded in a “limited and precise rationale” and be “clear, manageable, and politically neutral.” 541 U. S., at 306–308 (opinion concurring in judgment). An important reason for those careful constraints is that, as a Justice with extensive experience in state and local politics put it, “[t]he opportunity to control the drawing of electoral boundaries through the legislative process of apportionment is a critical and traditional part of politics in the United States.” Bandemer, 478 U. S., at 145 (opinion of O’Connor, J.). See Gaffney, 412 U. S., at 749 (observing that districting implicates “fundamental ‘choices about the nature of representation’” (quoting Burns v. Richardson, 384 U. S. 73, 92 (1966))). An expansive standard requiring “the correction of all election district lines drawn for partisan reasons would commit federal and state courts to unprecedented intervention in the American political process,” Vieth, 541 U. S., at 306 (opinion of Kennedy, J.).
One of the cases underlying this Supreme Court decision involves egregious Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland, my home state. The Congressional district my house should be in looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_3rd_congressional.... It's shaped that way to dilute the republicans in Annapolis with democrats from Prince Georges County, and push the rest of the southeast Maryland republicans into district 5.
This is clearly bad. But the question is, is it the role of the federal courts to do something about it? What do you think the reaction in Maryland would be if a Trump-appointed federal judge invalidated this district on constitutional grounds? This decision protects the federal judiciary from the inevitable shit show that would ensue in that and similar situations.
I think if you took every case heard by the Supreme Court and treated it the same way, they would likely make very few decisions. By these standards nothing is literal enough in the constitution to warrant a decision on pretty much anything really.
That's what you'd hope! Supreme Court Justices have lifetime tenure and are completely unaccountable to the public. We're not meant to be governed by a panel of philosopher-kings.
I can only imagine the new improved constitution. "If and only if you yell these 900 words and these 30000 phrases at an african american it's racism. But in these 90000 contexts these 1000 phrases are acceptable..."
Life is way too complex NOT to be governed (at the highest levels) by philosopher kings.
Supreme Court justices should (at least partially) be considered "problem solvers", not archaeologists.
The Governor of California should just say, "Thanks to today's Supreme Court decision, we intend to redistrict California to make it mathematically impossible for Republicans to win a single House seat". I bet you the Senate would agree to a federal anti-gerrymandering provision right quick after that.
I agree with you, however that's unfortunately not possible. The California Constitution defines the redistricting process in terms of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. We would need a ballot initiative to overturn it. I'm not aware of any initiatives to add such a provision to the ballot in 2020.
And then it would be the legislative branch mandating anti-gerrymandering, which according to today's ruling is the branch that should be doing it. So Gov Newsom totally should do it.
California districting is done by a nonpartisan commission outside the control of politicians and elections (except president/Vice President of USA) do not have parties in them (e.g. two republicans could be the two candidates for a seat).
It's pretty fitting that the justices who were appointed by presidents who seized power against the wishes of a majority of voters were the ones to drag this corruption-enabling decision over the finish line.
Pack the SC until they stop making corrupt decisions.
I don't know what else you call it when you get supreme executive power despite a majority of the voters not wanting you to have it. I'm aware that it wasn't illegal, but it doesn't mean it's legitimate.
> I'm aware that it wasn't illegal, but it doesn't mean it's legitimate.
Mind you, I'm no Trump fan, but "legal" is literally the only relevant definition of legitimacy in this context.
If the process by which Trump was elected was illegitimate, then the process by which all American Presidents have been elected is illegitimate. Americans have had two centuries to change the electoral college, and have not done so, because clearly voters have no problems with it when it benefits their side. Neither the presence nor the absence of a majority vote is, or has ever been, relevant.
We went though this with Obama, and a not-insignificant segment of the population believing him to be illegitimate. Before Obama, people on the left thought George W. Bush stole the election because of the debacle that was Florida.
It's a poisonous precedent to set, particularly in the radicalized atmosphere we find ourselves in, not to recognize the legitimacy of a government just because the "wrong" candidate won under the rules. How many more of these "illegitimate" Presidents are we going to go through before the losing side just decides to start shooting?
I hate Trump as much as any reasonable person, but Americans got exactly what they wanted, and deserved, with him.
Since the Constitution expressly places the approval of judges into the hands of the Senate, that is a bit of a non-sequitur.
McConnell took a gamble that paid off for his party- if the voters had chosen Hilary there is a very good chance she would have nominated a more leftist judge than Obama had. In the end it was actually a very prominent campaign issue and therefore was directly a choice before the voters, which in my mind would make it more legitimate in a 'democratic' context than the usual.
> Since the Constitution expressly places the approval of judges into the hands of the senate....
> [...] if the voters had chosen Hilary there is a very good chance she would have nominated a more leftist judge than Obama had.
Under your logic, they could have just waited for a Republican to become president before they voted to confirm any judges. Granted, that would have been an even bigger gamble (what if they lose the majority in the Senate in the meantime?), and even more justices could die or retire in the meantime.
How many seats need to be open before you would say the Senate must confirm someone? (1? 2? 5? 9?) How long are they allowed to wait? (6 months? a year? 4 years? 8 years?) . How dysfunctional could our government become before your logic implies the need to act?
I disagree. Obama received more votes than Donald Trump ever will. The voters already made a choice in 2012. Forcing reaffirmation for Democratic appointees, but not Republican ones, is a clear attempt to obstruct the power of the President.
Can you point to the law McConnell violated in doing this? And if not, in what sense is the current court illegitimate? Finally, how does this in any way address my question about the president "seizing" power?
It's the Senate's Constitutional responsibility to advise and consent the President's SCOTUS nominations. What is the procedure when they abdicate that responsibility? Remember, the Senate didn't tell Obama "no, we don't like your nominee." They, meaning McConnell, refused to hold any hearings on at all.
So maybe he didn't violate the law, but he certainly didn't uphold his Constitutional responsibilities, which I believe is part of the Oath of Office he took.
That is a distinction without a difference in this context, which is about the Senate abdicating their constitutional responsibilities. They didn't hold public hearings before 1916, that is true (the history of why they even started holding public hearings is pretty controversial in itself.) However, they still held yay/nay votes on the floor for the nominees, in order to fulfill their advise and consent role. McConnell refused to hold a vote, therefore he failed in upholding the Senate's constitutional role on the SCOTUS confirmation process.
That's not how the Senate works. They are not required to hold a vote in order to declare "nay" on a nominee. Declining to vote is effectively a "nay". It's no different than declining to hold a vote on a bill which they know will not pass.
This is how Congress and the co-equal branches of government are designed to work. Congress and the President often don't get along. It's a feature, not a bug.
1. Convince state legislatures to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which the Supreme Court will likely rule as unconstitutional)
2. Conduct an election where the popular vote winner differs from the electoral college winner (constitutional crisis ensues, along the lines of current Venezuelan situation)
3. Overcome the constitutional crisis and ensure that the popular vote winner becomes POTUS
That is the path forward if you want to pack the SC. Until then, the Senate will block any non-RNC president from appointing justices unless absolutely necessary.
I'm curious why you think SCOTUS would find the Compact unconstitutional? If anything, with the current makeup of the court, I believe they'd be more likely to rule that the individual states are free to choose their electors as they see fit.
At least now we can honestly say the system is still as vulnerable to being rigged as it was before.
I'm honestly at a loss for words.
EDIT: Words no longer 404ing.
It appears the Court is not satisfied with the State's criteria/legal reasoning to justify justicable action against the districting plans. They hold the measure must be politically neutral, and have some basis in being legally addressed.
They go at length to describe circumstances to describe cases with inherent justicability (districting along racial demographics), but offer no hints or grasps as to a measure of degree at which political gerrymandering becomes "excessive".
It looks like Maryland attempted to use "likelihood of persistence" of the gerrymandered district, but this was dismissed on allowability based on previous precedent. "Intent" was also singled out in a couple different wordings, but did not hold satisfactorally for the Court.
Of particular concern was of the Federal Courts to support State Court's particular measures on what constitutes excessive gerrymandering. It seems the Court is nudging State populations to appeal to the Federal Legislature to oversee malconduct in individual State districting. I find this concerning, seeing as our Federal Legislature has enough on it's plate with getting things passed, and the last thing we want is to start having the different levels trying to micromanage each other.
I can sort of see some tiny speck of Wisdom in their judgement. I don't necessarily find it satisfying, but I have to grudgingly admit they at least reasoned it out.
Ookay. Apparently something in my phrasing seems to have ruffled some degree of feather, but I'm not seeing much in the way as to response to substance, so perhaps a final clarification is in order.
On vulnerability to being rigged:
I Absolutely see gerrymandering as a form of systemic cheat. It is a legal option within the explicit constraints laid down by the Framers, however, from a systems oriented point of view, the practice of districting is meant as a way to geographically divide up up the space in a State in such a way as to allow representation to be ideally derived equitably via geographical proximity.
I find any attempt to try to engineer a district based on anything but geographical division to be highly suspect. I understand local footprints change, and redistricting may be required, but the process should be looked at as an technical apolitical consideration, rather than as a strategic way to exploit statistics to try to shift district lines into a more favorable arrangement for one party or another. My original statement was meant to clarify that the Supreme Court decision hasn't really changed anything in the grand scheme of things. I.e. no new vulnerabilities to gerrymandering were introduced. There was only a closing of the door on the Federal Courts picking sides.
On the rest; I find both Maryland and North Carolina's attempts to quantify and measure the effects of gerrymandering admirable, even if the Supreme Court chose to abstain from the fight. I'm not 100% clear, but I don't recall having seen SCOTUS overturning the lower court's judgements; they merely proclaimed that no precedent derived from either case had standing within the context of the Federal system, and further remedy would need to be sought either in the National Congress, or through State specific law. Then again, I may need to re-read.
Wasn't trying to start a flame war, even though apparently my initial knee-jerk reaction did. I could not understand how gerrymandering could have been casually tossed aside, even with their reasoning. It took a bit of stepping back to get the subtler points to crystallize.
Anarchism dominates, but some anarchists failed. Do you really think that the RNC has a political philosophy beyond "do whatever we need to stay in power"? There is no rule of law, they just tell liberals there is so as to pacify them.
You're gonna have to back that initial assertion up with something more solid than 'everything not mandated by the state is a manifestation of a joyous anarchic impulse' or similar pseudophilosophy that regrettably dominates anarchist literature and marks it as an erotic orientation rather than a political position.
Political ideologies are lenses to view the world from. Some make more sense than others.
When non-violent drug crimes result in 30 year prison sentences while violent sexual crimes against minors result in no prison sentences, it is clear that the rule of law does not exist.
Curiously enough, the only parts of the country that have ever approached anything resembling "failure" are (heavily progressive) urban areas like NYC and Detroit.
I think we need to set some terms here. What do you consider "failing"? Not that I'm really looking to jump into the mud and wrastle on this one, this seems like a perfect point for a -citation needed-
I put the word in quotes to indicate the tendentiousness of any potential definition. I personally don't think of any part of America as having "failed," but if you force me to pick, I'd choose any area that suffered from breakdown in law and order and severe de-population. NYC in the late 70s and Detroit's long-running (but hopefully interrupted?) decline especially come to mind. A number of other urban centers could potentially fit too.
Fair enough, and I agree with your sentiment. I think I can point to some rural states economic downturns, criminal problems and terrible literacy rates and draw similar conclusions.
I think the best move here is to agree that either side (rural vs urban, left vs right, whatever vs it's opposite) could cherry pick items to point to and say "these bad things prove my point".
I'm not inclined to think that slow demographic decline constitutes failure. Even if you disagree with that, my preferred definition has the additional "law and order" requirement, and I've never seen a rural example of a "Bronx is burning"-type event.
You are playing really fast and loose with definitions so it’s hard to know what you consider a failure case but rural areas now have higher crime rates than the national average.
Incarceration rates are also now led by rural areas[0]. Anyone who has spent time in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio or West Virginian rural areas have driven through areas that easily could be called ‘failed’. And that’s just from my personal experience.
I’d say your position that only progressive places have failed I’d just your bias showing and doesn’t have any basis in fact. And that’s before you dig into whether it was progressive policies that led to the 2 failures you do mention.
I earlier acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a reasonable definition of "failed." I will say that I don't think it's enough to be simply below-average in literacy or above-average in crime or whatever; you really want a multivariate outlier in the space of social pathologies. I suspect that most ways of operationalizing "failure" will capture primarily urban decay, like the examples I brought up.
Does rural West Virginia rise to that level? Having been there myself, I don't think so, though I could be convinced otherwise. Can you point to large-ish rural areas that match the dysfunction of, say, south-side Chicago? Preferably along with some (crude) quantitative comparisons. I'm genuinely curious here; not trying to pick on progressive policies.
Have you considered that density itself is a contributing factor? That's hardly a stretch. Perhaps certain effects will be magnified in cities compared to rural areas or states containing both. And those cities might also tend more toward the Democrat end of the political spectrum. Correlation still does not equal causation. The whole "failed cities are X" trope doesn't suggest any useful policy either, unless you think emulating China's "Down to the Countryside" movement would be a great idea.
I contend that, adjusting for density, places like Mississippi or Appalachia stand as stark counterexamples to any theory that being "blue" leads to failure. In fact, a pretty strong argument could be made that "blue" policies around things like public vs. private goods, fossil vs. renewable energy, or respect for immigrants are the only reason urban failures haven't been worse or more widespread. Believe it or not, Detroit could be worse, and I believe would be worse if certain "heartland" attitudes were more prevalent there. Literal "smoking hole in the ground" worse.
To bring this back to the original topic, the inevitable trend toward greater urbanization therefore means it's even more important to address gerrymandering now instead of kicking the can down the road. Letting the rural few dictate to the urban many will surely lead to heartbreak and pain, no matter what other beliefs are involved.
All good points. Some blue cities do very well and some do very poorly. I have to conclude that the problems are mostly exogenous to policy.
> being “blue” leads to failure
To be clear, I was never suggesting that progressive policies lead inexorably to decline—the most successful parts of the county are blue.
> a pretty strong argument could be made
I’m more skeptical here. The policies you cite are neither necessary nor sufficient for vitality. Most pointedly, progressive values were nonexistent for most of America’s history, and yet it did quite well economically.
> literal “smoking hole in the ground” worse
But my whole point is that it was a smoking hole in the ground! I started this whole thread by responding to a claim about the inevitability of red states going “third world.” To my eye, such a thing has never happened to rural areas, but has happened to urban areas (I might add, with some frequency). Be it density or whatever—there’s something that needs to be explained.
> rural few dictate to the urban many
Agreed. I think it would be equally bad for the urban many to dictate to the rural few. Federal level policy is inappropriate for most things
Really? When did Detroit burn to the ground? When I said literally, I meant literally. I've lived in Detroit, and still have family there. Sure it's bad but it's not literally an unlivable ruin.
> it would be equally bad for the urban many to dictate to the rural few
Equally bad? No, sorry, I don't believe majority and minority rule are equally just or effective. However few or many things should be decided at a federal level (nice red herring there), those things should be decided by votes and votes should be equal. Saying each member of one group should get more votes or more representation than each member of another is saying we should have a class system, and I reject that. There is a clear moral difference between majority and minority rule.
No, not literally a smoking hole (though I believe arson was a problem for a time?) But as close to one as you’re going to get in the USA.
I can’t disagree more with your majoritarian arguments. You (and I) would probably object when, e.g. California voters ban gay marriage. But you cheer when slim majorities attempt to saddle others with heavy economic burdens or interpose themselves in others’ contractual arrangements. I find most democratic decisions illegitimate; how hard is to to just keep your nose out of other people’s business?
The founders were aware of urban/rural tension from the beginning. The system was designed to make it difficult to force obligations on fellow citizens. That means majorities are being thwarted in their efforts, and that’s a good thing.
You're still conflating two things: what gets decided at a federal level, and how. How big that category is doesn't matter. It's utterly irrelevant. What matters is that, when those decision points do occur, letting the minority prevail would be worse.
> I find most democratic decisions illegitimate
Ah, the political equivalent of solipsism. Sorry, but this isn't the forum to address such fundamental fallacies. Hard pass.
You seem to be positing a world where “bad” decisions are somehow kept off the ballot, leaving only a menu of “good” options for the wise majority to enact.
Well, that’s not our world. When a CA gay marriage ban comes up for vote, it’s important to me that the majority not get their way. And unless I’ve seriously misapprehended your politics, I’m not sure why you’re advancing an argument where such a ban is just because “letting the minority prevail” would be worse.
So yeah, it’s a mistake to treat the “what” and the “how” of decision-making separately.
> When a CA gay marriage ban comes up for vote, it’s important to me that the majority not get their way
That's why we have constitutions. Minority rule doesn't solve that, and in fact makes it more likely that the evangelical minority will shove their religion down everyone else's throats. Thanks for underlining my point.
Your argument against minority rule is to invoke... the courts? "Majority rule is great. Except when it does stuff I don't like, in which case I'll lean on minority rule by an infinitesimal number of unaccountable dudes in black robes to override it."
Constitutions are not enough. This isn't an academic question. Throughout the country's history, majorities have consistently trampled the rights of minorities. To me, majority rule looks an awful lot like rampant injustice. Minority rule looks like defense.
Minority rule by whom? Do you think for one fevered second that your minority will be the one to get its way? No, you hanging from a tree in Gilead is about a thousand times more likely. Please go study the history of aristocracies, theocracies, and colonies where minority rule prevailed, and pay particular attention to how someone like you would have fared under them.
Majority rule is imperfect. Constitutional limitation is imperfect. Federalism is imperfect. That's why people have spent centuries trying to devise systems that use all of these tools in balance against one another, because the alternatives - autocracy or anarchy immediately turning into autocracy - are far worse.
It's easy to change my mind on this: just provide me a decision rule that'll put rural decay data points on the "failure" side of the classification boundary while leaving urban decay on the other.
This section really resonates:
> It is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context. It may mean achieving a greater number of competitive districts by undoing packing and cracking so that supporters of the disadvantaged party have a better shot at electing their preferred candidates. But it could mean engaging in cracking and packing to ensure each party its “appropriate” share of “safe” seats. Or perhaps it should be measured by adherence to “traditional” districting criteria. Deciding among those different visions of fairness poses basic questions that are political, not legal. There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments. And it is only after determining how to define fairness that one can even begin to answer the determinative question: “How much is too much?”