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.
There isnt any need for a constituonal amendment to stop gerrymandering. A simple act of Congress will do it
And, to be absolutely clear, nothing less than an act of Congress will stop it nationwide. And any anti-gerrymandering measure that isn’t nationwide is an endorsement of partisan gerrymandering in red states.
I don’t see how an act of Congress could do it for the same legal reasons Trump can’t “nationalize” elections, and the same reason I believe the supreme Court upheld this.
The States have the right to organize how votes are performed, but no one in the U.S. has a right to vote in reality. They have a right to not be discriminated against during voting.
Let’s say Florida decided they won’t have a popular vote for president and the currently elected representatives vote on the electors.
Every person in Florida just lost their right to vote, but they did not discriminate in doing so, and it could be legal. The residents would have to be pissed at their State government for allowing such a vote to pass… But federally, it could be constitutional.
Gerrymander remapping has been deemed unconstitutional in other states specifically because they were trying to manipulate representation of certain races to change the results.
It took two constitutional amendments to make states allow black people and women to vote. There’s another banning poll taxes and the like.
https://www.usa.gov/voting-rights
Most US laws on voting rely on those amendments for support. That’s why it’s only illegal to gerrymander if it disenfranchises minorities.
There is nothing in the constitution directly disallowing extreme racial gerrymanders. Those are unlawful not because they’re unconditional, but because they’re prohibited by the voting rights act.
Congress could very well have passed simple laws banning racial and gender disenfranchisement in federal elections. The amendments were necessary to impose a rule on sub-federal elections and to keep a mere majority from taking the franchise away.
The US Constituon is neither very long nor hard to read, and it has oodles of text that Congress could invoke to ban the gerrymandering of congressional districts:
US Constitution article 1 section 4:
Article 4, section 4:
14th amendment section 2:
Which is backed by the US constitution and in particular the 14th amendment. The “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th amendment in particular is frequently cited in challenges to racial gerrymandering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._Johnson
SCOTUS rulings are not the constitution. While the country operated on the idea that a supreme court ruling was final law for a few decades, the Roberts court forever destroyed the idea of binding precedent when they discarded Roe v Wade.
Racial gerrymandering is now effectively constitutional so long as there’s a fig leaf of partisanship. While SCOTUS could plausibly jump the other way in the future, Congress is literally the primary body of the US federal government, and has all the power they want to ban gerrymandering in house districts and plausibly even local jurisdictions.
Which is why… I’m saying… We need a constitutional amendment… to make it illegal outright to gerrymander.
I don’t mean to argue that an amendment wouldn’t work, or be the correct next-step. We just don’t need to wait for one, just like we didnt need one to pass a law making an officiated gay marriage legit in every state no matter what local laws say.
It’s like SCOTUS reform. Sure, we should pass an amendment and enshrine the reform into a hard-to-revert form, but that shouldn’t stop us from defining good behavior and kicking Scalia to the curb.