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.
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?