Having already wrongly permitted the unlimited use of raw partisan factors in redistricting, the US Supreme Court now appears poised to block the use of racial factors in drawing maps.
While the Court may want state legislators to be completely neutral on race, doing so would lead to greater political manipulation of the maps, and, abetted by President Trump, the Republican Party will continue to skew the maps to favor the desires of voters.
Fair maps, like the ones we have in New York, are best for democracy, but the GOP doesn’t want fair maps.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court I heard the arguments In a case involving Louisiana’s efforts to repeal the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that guaranteed racial minorities access to representation in Congress. Although the same section was only preserved in mid-2023, the court’s conservative majority seemed open to repealing it; It has largely ceased to care about precedent, or decency.
We wouldn’t say the Supreme Court is considering striking down this law, one of the most important legacies of the mid-century civil rights movement, just because it has already done so. It is like finishing the job, by hacking one of the only remaining elements of historical legislation. The Court has already previously permitted overt partisan gerrymandering, for example, by using tortured logic to sign off on what appear to be anti-democratic efforts.
Much of these lawsuits rely on the argument that racism and discriminatory electoral outcomes are in fact a solved problem, which ignores the fact that much of the progress that has been made is due precisely to constraints such as those on human rights. Voting Rights Act.
With such a positive list of court rulings, perhaps on the way, Trump Republicans have increasingly dropped even the pretense that they do not reflect the polarity of the American electoral system, where representatives choose their electors rather than the other way around.
Trump, who has a habit of coming out and saying outright what the rest of the party was trying to do surreptitiously, blatantly demanded that the Texas legislature strip five additional congressional seats through blatant redistricting, and this state I dutifully complied. In doing so, these legislators chose to strip their constituents of their electoral voice and take another step away from our nation’s legacy as a long-standing beacon of democracy, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, North Carolina, a state with a 10-4 Republican congressional majority despite being practically evenly split on voters’ partisan preferences, is looking to… Participate in the event And redistricting for another safe GOP seat just for good measure.
These efforts are not just about the individual members who will make up the next Congress, but about what Congress itself can do to protect its authority as a co-equal branch of government. So far, the House GOP majority under Mike Johnson, Trump’s surrogate, has shown itself perfectly content to let the president withdraw his constitutional and statutory powers — withholding funds already appropriated by Congress, setting tariffs that Congress alone should have the authority to enact, taking military action without informing Congress of its legal rationale, and so on.
In the immediate sense, these redistricting efforts are intended to keep it that way: a castrated Congress that sits idly by while Trump strips it of all its power and concentrates power on himself. Regardless of any particular political leanings you may have, this is exactly the thing that our three branch government, formed by the Founders who had just gone to war against the tyranny of the King, was supposed to prevent.
MAGA lawmakers are already salivating over the prospect of dividing up neighborhoods, towns and cities across the country to consolidate their power. If she had any integrity left, the Supreme Court would say no.