The Supreme Court is allowing California to use its new congressional map for this year’s midterm election, clearing the way for the state’s gerrymandered districts as Democrats and Republicans continue their fight for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The state’s voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas’ new GOP-friendly map, which President Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.
And in an unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court’s majority denied an emergency request by the California’s Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state’s GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.
That’s one hell of an interesting twist.
Roberts and Gorsuch aren’t obsessed with winning every short-game match up. They need gerrymandering to be legal in the abstract and for the long term. If they start trying to thread the needle between California and Texas, they give the lower courts more opportunities to overturn maps in Republican states and a future SCOTUS more elbow room to overturn their whole reading of legislative maps.
In a wave year where Republicans are likely getting swamped out of dozens of seats anyway, there’s very little to gain and a lot to lose by creating an exception to the rule on when gerrymandering is legal.
The Roberts SCOTUS has already given any future SCOTUS ample precedent for utterly ignoring previous rulings as it suits their partisan needs several times over. If they think this one somehow stands separate from anything else it’s laughable.
I’m sure they have something worse up their sleeve, and this wasn’t worth the PR flak they’d catch.
Congratulations, you can use your maps!
On an unrelated note, your maps don’t matter, because we’re gonna let a pants-shitting child rapist cancel the elections as long as he says they’re “rigged.”
And even if he isn’t able to do that, just the simple fact that Republicans have dominated rural areas and have ton of states with almost zero population in their thrall means they have a lot more room to run up the scoreboard with map shenanigans. If gerrymandering is legal for everyone, that’s a net loss for the Dems.
There’s more potential in gerrymandering for Dems currently, as they’ve done less of it overall (outside of Maryland and a few others).
At the same time actually making gerrymandering illegal could start to impact current maps.
The former likely won’t matter much until 2032. The latter matters now. We all know they’re thinking in the short term.
I’m sure they’ll use this to justify flipping the Texas decision
I thought the Texas one was already permitted.
It it? I feel like anyone paying attention knew this is how it was going to go.
Heck, look at my post history. I offered 3:1 odds on this over a week ago.
This supreme court has some loons on it, but if you thought they were gonna rule against California here you haven’t been paying attention.
I only see 1 unrelated post in your post history. Maybe it was a different account?
Weird. Not sure why. It was definitely this account. Here’s a permalink:
https://vger.to/lemmy.world/comment/21824312