U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Racial Gerrymandering

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member
Voting matters. If we had a dem senate then we'd have 9 Justices...





The U.S. Supreme Court returns Monday to the issue of race in politics when it hears claims that North Carolina and Virginia packed African-Americans into a small number of voting districts to limit their statewide electoral power.

Both cases present challenges to new maps drawn after the 2010 census. In North Carolina the issue is the boundaries for its congressional districts, while in Virginia state legislative districts are contested.

Both states say they face two competing pressures. The Voting Rights Act requires them to consider race when redistricting so that minority voting rights are not diluted. But past Supreme Court rulings have held that race cannot be the predominant factor when the maps are redrawn.




North Carolina is accused of packing African-American voters into two congressional districts — the First, which the challengers describe as "a behemoth sprawling from the rural Coastal Plain to the City of Durham," and the Twelfth, a narrow band than arcs from Charlotte to Greensboro and has been described as the nation's most oddly shaped district.

The challengers say the state packed in more African-American voters even though they were already electing minority candidates by forming coalitions with white voters. There was no need, their lawsuit says, to add more minority voters, which diminished their voting strength in other districts.

"The State of North Carolina wrote the book on racial gerrymandering," says Washington, DC lawyer Marc Elias, who represents the challengers in both cases. The state acted "to string together disparate black communities from far-flung parts of the state."

North Carolina says politics, not race, was the main factor in drawing the new maps. Washington, DC lawyer Paul Clement, representing both states, says the consultant who prepared the plan for North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature "did not even look at racial demographics."

In essence the state claims it wasn't packing blacks into the two disputed districts, it was shifting Democrats.


The Virginia case involves twelve state legislative districts in which African-American voters amounted to between 46 and 62 percent of the population. When the new maps were drawn, each had a black voting population of over 55 percent.

Such a mechanical approach, the challengers say, is clear evidence that race was the predominant factor. "People cannot be viewed first and foremost as a function of their face in determining whether to place them in one district or another," Elias says.

Virginia says it was honoring the requirement of the Voting Rights Act to avoid diluting the minority vote and "arrived at the eminently reasonable number of 55 percent" as the appropriate minimum for the minority voting age population.

The justice must decide whether the new maps are the result of politics as usual, with the party in power trying to maximize its strength, or unconstitutional racial discrimination.

The court will announce its decision by late June.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-supreme-court-takes-racial-gerrymandering-n691421?cid=sm_tw
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Damn. Unfortunately, this one will NOT be decided before Trump makes his appointment and the same is confirmed. :mad:
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator


And there are more . . . ; bring on the tour !!!

Oh, and while were at it, lets remind some of "OUR" representatives that it doesn't help when they acquiesce in making their districts "heavily Black or minority" or "Absolutely Safe" because that can have the consequence of making other districts less liberal or progressive (or eliminating districts where more progressives can be elected) resulting in impermeable conservative districts.


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
While these 2 cases await decision by the Supreme Court, Redistricting action is alive on another front:

Holder: Obama is 'ready to roll'

p o l i t i c o
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
02/28/17

Barack Obama is getting closer to making his public re-appearance in politics, his friend and former Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday.

Holder said he’s been talking to the former president about ways — including fundraising and interacting with state legislators — that could help the new National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama asked Holder to chair last year.

“It’s coming. He’s coming,”
Holder said, speaking to reporters at a briefing for the new group. “And he’s ready to roll.”

Throughout, Holder said, Obama “will be a more visible part of the effort.”


Holder Prediction


Holder also predicted that the usual pattern of the party in the White House losing state legislative seats in off-year elections would hold next year, but “I expect we’ll see that on steroids with President Trump.”

The NDRC is looking to be an intensified central force for Democrats to tackle their disadvantage in gerrymandering.

The mission is to direct resources into winning targeted state elections, [AND] push ballot initiatives for nonpartisan district-drawing commissions and wage legal challenges to existing maps.

The hope is that this would put Democrats in a stronger position in state houses, but also in the U.S. House of Representatives, if districts are drawn that more accurately represent the distribution of the popular vote, citing statistics that showed Republicans winning 49 percent of the vote in those elections but getting 55 percent of the seats in the 2016 elections.​


Marc Elias, a top election lawyer who’s advising the group, said that in addition to joining existing challenges to state laws, they’re already prospecting for states where they could file new lawsuits, predicting they’ll file more before the end of 2017.

Holder acknowledged that the work in the courts has gotten more difficult with Jeff Sessions now in his old job running the Justice Department. He called the department’s decision to scrap a challenge to voter laws in Texas on Monday “disheartening,” but said that while “it would be good to have the Justice Department on our side … it doesn’t mean that the argument can’t be made, and can’t be made well.”

“This is really a battle for our democracy,” Holder said. “The notion that people are denied their ability to cast a meaningful vote … is inconsistent with who we say we are, inconsistent with what we say our democracy is about.”


SOURCE: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/eric-holder-obama-ready-public-235508


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Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member
While these 2 cases await decision by the Supreme Court, Redistricting action is alive on another front:

Holder: Obama is 'ready to roll'

p o l i t i c o
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
02/28/17

Barack Obama is getting closer to making his public re-appearance in politics, his friend and former Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday.

Holder said he’s been talking to the former president about ways — including fundraising and interacting with state legislators — that could help the new National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama asked Holder to chair last year.

“It’s coming. He’s coming,”
Holder said, speaking to reporters at a briefing for the new group. “And he’s ready to roll.”

Throughout, Holder said, Obama “will be a more visible part of the effort.”


Holder Prediction


Holder also predicted that the usual pattern of the party in the White House losing state legislative seats in off-year elections would hold next year, but “I expect we’ll see that on steroids with President Trump.”

The NDRC is looking to be an intensified central force for Democrats to tackle their disadvantage in gerrymandering.

The mission is to direct resources into winning targeted state elections, [AND] push ballot initiatives for nonpartisan district-drawing commissions and wage legal challenges to existing maps.

The hope is that this would put Democrats in a stronger position in state houses, but also in the U.S. House of Representatives, if districts are drawn that more accurately represent the distribution of the popular vote, citing statistics that showed Republicans winning 49 percent of the vote in those elections but getting 55 percent of the seats in the 2016 elections.​


Marc Elias, a top election lawyer who’s advising the group, said that in addition to joining existing challenges to state laws, they’re already prospecting for states where they could file new lawsuits, predicting they’ll file more before the end of 2017.

Holder acknowledged that the work in the courts has gotten more difficult with Jeff Sessions now in his old job running the Justice Department. He called the department’s decision to scrap a challenge to voter laws in Texas on Monday “disheartening,” but said that while “it would be good to have the Justice Department on our side … it doesn’t mean that the argument can’t be made, and can’t be made well.”

“This is really a battle for our democracy,” Holder said. “The notion that people are denied their ability to cast a meaningful vote … is inconsistent with who we say we are, inconsistent with what we say our democracy is about.”


SOURCE: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/eric-holder-obama-ready-public-235508


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This was something he was planning on doing even before Hillary lost. I look forward to seeing him in action when he doesn't have to be neutral on some things.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Republican redistricting is taking a beating in the courts (again)


REDAMERICA.jpg




This post has been updated with other experts weighing in on the implications of the North Carolina case on other gerrymandering cases.

This year, federal courts have been litigating a steady stream of gerrymandering claims. And most of the electoral maps the courts have knocked down were drawn by Republicans.

That’s good news for Democrats: They have an opportunity in several states to draw more favorable congressional and state legislative maps ahead of 2018 elections. And every seat counts, given the 2020 Census is right around the corner, which brings with it the opportunity in many states to draw new district maps.

Some Republican legislatures are paying the price for capturing 21 chambers in the 2010 elections, the last time electoral maps were being drawn. Monday, North Carolina became the third GOP-controlled state legislature in a row to get its map-drawing skills declared illegal by the Supreme Court.

What’s more, some gerrymandering experts think the court ruled against North Carolina Republicans in a way that opens the door for Democrats to potentially challenge almost all mapmaking in the South.

Here’s a rundown of the redistricting landscape — and how it could affect our elections.


May: The Supreme Court throws out North Carolina’s GOP-drawn congressional map


AP_6327588045901472155454.jpg

Members of North Carolina student chapters of the NAACP protest the state's voter ID law in 2013, which was struck down by the courts
for targeting minorities, as a federal judge said, “with almost surgical precision.” (Gerry Broome/AP)


The Supreme Court ruled Monday that North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature illegally looked at people’s race when drawing two majority-black congressional districts in the state.

Lawmakers argued they were only looking at drawing lines based on people’s party affiliation, but the court ruled that it is reasonable to assume that, in a state like North Carolina, party affiliation are race are pretty much synonymous.

The way the court arrived at its decision is a big deal, said Doug Johnson, a redistricting expert with Claremont McKenna College. “It’s the first time the court has used party as a proxy for race,” he said. “It opens the door to throwing out partisan gerrymandering as well.”

Other gerrymandering experts disagree that this decision has any implications for partisan gerrymandering. "This is a traditional case about racial gerrymandering, pure and simple," said Rick Pildes, an expert on redistricting law at New York University.

North Carolina Republicans held their 10 to 3 lock on congressional districts. But the court could now have a different way of reviewing yet another upcoming case in North Carolina, where legislators explicitly said they were drawing lines based on politics, and in Maryland, the lone pending gerrymandering case where Democrats drew the map.


March: Supreme Court questions Virginia GOP-drawn state legislative maps

imrs.php

Virginia state Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D) is now the congressman from the state's 4th Congressional District, thanks in part to new lines
being drawn. (Steve Helber/AP)

When the justices looked at Virginia’s state legislative maps in March, the Supreme Court didn’t say whether they thought the state’s GOP-controlled legislature had illegally drawn districts to group together African American voters (and dilute their impact across the state).

Instead, they told a lower court to take another look at whether Republicans illegally drew their maps. As The Washington Post’s Robert Barnes and Gregory S. Schneider wrote at the time, “The decision was a win for black voters and Democrats.”

Virginia state elections are in the fall, and all 100 state House seats are up. It’s unclear whether the legal challenges will finish in time to require the redrawing of maps.

But Virginia also brings with it a reminder that map changes do have consequences: In November, Democrats picked up a seat here after the 4th Congressional District was redrawn for — you guessed it — being illegally gerrymandered.


Also in March: Three congressional districts in Texas get struck down

imrs.php



A federal court decided that Texas’s legislature intentionally tried to disenfranchise minority voters when it drew its congressional districts in 2011.

The court threw out three districts — two of which are held by Republicans. Any redrawing will likely give Democrats and Latino voters more say here, which could make an Austin-area district held by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D) more blue and a swing district along the border even more difficult for Rep. Will Hurd (R) to hold onto. (Hurd won it by less than a percentage point in November.)

This isn’t the first time that Texas has been legal trouble regarding voting rights. A federal court also recently found that a 2011 Texas voter ID law discriminated against minorities.

Two strikes could force Texas back under the supervision of federal officials, who would review any election changes Texas wants to make. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling invalidating a key part of the Voting Rights Act freed Texas and other Southern states from federal oversight.


January: Wisconsin and Alabama GOP-drawn state legislative maps get thrown out, courts ask state legislatures to redraw

Alabama: A federal court found a dozen state legislative districts in Alabama were unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. (The Democratic judge on that panel wrote that he would have thrown out 24 districts.) All 12 state legislative districts that were thrown out were represented by Democrats, 10 of them by African American legislators. The legislature is redrawing the maps now, and because there are so many, they'll likely have to redraw all state House and Senate districts.

Wisconsin: A federal court ordered Wisconsin’s legislature to redraw state House legislative districts after finding in November that the districts were unconstitutionally partisan.

Partisan. That's the key. This marks the first time in a decade that a court has thrown out legislative maps because they favored voters of one party over another. And therefore, this will be the first time in a decade that lawmakers will have to redraw maps specifically to make them more fair for both parties (not just to consider race). The shake-up is so profound that the legislature will probably have to redraw the state Senate districts as well.

Wisconsin’s attorney general, a Republican, has appealed to the Supreme Court. If they take up the case, it could be monumental: The Supreme Court has never been clear on what, exactly, constitutes illegal partisan gerrymandering, so a ruling on Wisconsin could set precedent for years to come.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...g-in-the-courts-again/?utm_term=.6ce8d7b723b7



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Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member



The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in Gill v. Whitford, the first of many cases before the Court this term that challenge electoral restrictions and gerrymandering efforts. And it was a doozy of an oral argument.

First, some background. This case involves a challenge to the redistricting plan adopted in 2011 by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature. A federal court struck down the plan in 2016, ruling it unconstitutional because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering, a practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one political party at the expense of another. The court blocked Wisconsin from using that map and told it to adopt a new redistricting plan by November 1, 2017. The State of Wisconsin then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take the case but stayed the order blocking the redistricting maps.

In this case, the challengers, led by retired law professor William Whitford, argue that the redistricting plan would allow Republicans to maintain control of the state’s legislature, even if the party falls out of political favor. In other words, it’s become almost impossible to elect a Democrat to office, they allege. According to the challengers, the federal district court’s decision corrected “a serious democratic malfunction that would otherwise have gone unremedied.”

According to the parties challenging the maps, Wisconsin Republicans used two gerrymandering techniques to ensure this captured political power. The first, they claim, was that the map was drawn to “pack” Democrat voters into a small number of districts. The challengers also claim that Wisconsin lawmakers then “cracked” other Democrat voters into several other districts in a way that would ensure Democrats would fall just short of a majority. All in all, the challengers say, the excess votes for a winning candidate in a packed district, and the votes for a losing candidate in a cracked district, are “wasted.” Unsurprisingly, the challengers allege, the wasted votes for the Democrats far outnumber those for Republicans. And all of this, they say, amounts to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Attorneys for the State of Wisconsin, however, argue that if the lower court’s decision is allowed to stand, it will open the door to “unprecedented intervention [by the federal courts] in the American political process.” The state also argues that the 2011 redistricting plan does not violate the Constitution, because politics was only one of many factors the legislature considered in drafting the new electoral map. The state insists this “complies with traditional redistricting principles.” The state also argues that the challengers lack standing to challenge the redistricting plan.

Courts have typically shied away from taking on questions involving political, rather than racial, gerrymandering. That is in part because those disputes are traditionally considered “political” questions that the legislature should decide, not the courts. But more and more states have claimed their efforts to draw legislative districts are not racially discriminatory, but rather part of a longstanding practice that the winning party gets to draw electoral maps as it sees fit. In other words, conservatives have tried to argue, their political gerrymandering is allowed under the law even if it at times it overlaps with racial gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court really does not enjoy jumping into gerrymandering cases, and the look of exasperation on many of the justices’ faces, in addition to the difficult and pointed questions they posed to the attorneys Tuesday, proved that exact point.

Attorney Misha Tseytlin of the Wisconsin Department of Justice argued first, telling the justices that the challengers in this case are trying to kick the redistricting process from the state legislature to the courts, which would place judges in the position of deciding “the fate of maps based upon battles of the experts.” The case, he said, represents a “redistricting revolution.”

Tseytlin did not get much further into his argument before Justice Anthony Kennedy—the likely swing vote in the case—began to pepper him with questions.

After Kennedy asked whether the state’s gerrymandering attempts violated First Amendment guarantees of freedom of association, Justice Stephen Breyer, the Court’s data nerd, wanted to know if there was some easier way to get accurate numbers on how many voters were affected by the gerrymandered maps, noting that redistricting cases are very technical for courts to parse through.

Justice Elena Kagan then observed that technology advances have made the redistricting process even more sophisticated, giving partisan politicians more opportunity to try and manipulate it. Justice Sonia Sotomayor reminded Tseytlin that the state didn’t even produce any evidence at the trial court or to the Supreme Court that directly rebutted the challengers’ claims: that Wisconsin lawmakers drew three different possible redistricting maps and decided to choose the one most likely to keep Republicans in power for as long as possible. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked the “precious right to vote,” asking whether people would bother to vote at all if they assumed their vote wasn’t going to count.

Needless to say, it appeared that Tseytlin has had better days at work.

Still, there is no guarantee the challengers will win here. When it came time for Attorney Paul Smith to argue on behalf of his clients, it became clear the conservative justices were looking for a way to rule that the challengers did not have standing to bring a claim against the gerrymander outside of their individual voting districts. Chief Justice John Roberts started the questioning by suggesting that if the Court rules in favor of the challengers, every legislative map drawn for redistricting will face a legal challenge that will eventually wind up before the Supreme Court.

Smith pushed back hard against the chief justice on this point, arguing the country was on the “cusp of a … more serious problem” that would produce a “festival of copycat gerrymandering” in 2020 if the Court rejected his clients’ claims. Then, Smith said, every state would end up as gerrymandered as Wisconsin.

“Gerrymanders now are not your father’s gerrymander,” Smith told the justices.

Oral arguments rarely provide a clear answer as to the outcome of any case, let alone one that has reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But if I had to guess, I’d say Wisconsin is going to lose here. The attorneys for the state barely disputed the fact that the legislative map chosen by lawmakers was the most partisan map they could create. Justice Samuel Alito said the challengers were painting “a very dire picture” of the electoral process, almost suggesting they should just lighten up.

But it will very likely be Justice Kennedy’s vote that will decide this case. And if his demeanor and questions were any indication of how he is leaning, Wisconsin Republicans should brace for a loss.

A decision in the case will likely come this spring, and if Kennedy does side with the liberal justices then there is even a chance that the Supreme Court could push back against the kinds of political power grabs Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere have made through the gerrymandering process. Almost 20 years after Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that in 2000 singlehandedly delivered the presidency to Republicans, that would be a good result. But it’s certainly not a guarantee.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
JURISPRUDENCE
THE LAW, LAWYERS, AND THE COURT.
OCT. 4 2017 4:00 PM

Partisan Gerrymandering Got the Sotomayor Treatment

The justice has a knack for crafting simple, devastating questions. She was at her best in Gill v. Whitford.

By Mark Joseph Stern

171004_JURIS_Sotomayor-GillvWhitford.jpg.CROP.promo-xlarge2.jpg

Sonia Sotomayor arrives at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20 in Washington.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images



mark_stern-authorbio.png
MARK JOSEPH STERN
Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues.​


Throughout Tuesday’s oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court’s left-leaning justices grilled Wisconsin’s attorneys with tough questions that suggest a majority of the court is prepared to impose constitutional limits on political redistricting. The highlight of the hour came when Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a very simple inquiry that cut to the core of the case:

Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering?

How does that help our system of government?”

Sotomayor’s question arrived after the justices had debated abstract principles of law (and math) for nearly half an hour. Kennedy and the liberals had already laid out their constitutional case against partisan gerrymandering: When Republicans draw district lines designed to dilute the power of Democratic votes, they are punishing Democratic voters for associating with, and expressing support for, the Democratic Party. (The same goes, naturally, for Democrats drawing district lines to dilute the power of Republican votes.) This viewpoint-based burden on the right to vote clearly infringes upon the freedom of expression and association protected by the First Amendment. Given that the First Amendment is the cornerstone of self-governance, political redistricting would seem to pose a grievous threat to representative democracy, entrenching undemocratic legislative majorities by penalizing voters who openly support the minority party.

It can be easy to get lost in the technicalities of constitutional doctrine, or the putative gobbledygook of gerrymandering math, and lose sight of the broader principle at stake. Sotomayor, though, has never been one to lose sight of first principles. Her question on Tuesday was simple but devastatingly effective. Erin E. Murphy, the attorney representing Wisconsin’s (very gerrymandered) State Senate, had no good answer for Sotomayor. “I don’t think that … districting for partisan advantage has nopositive values,” Erin Murphy began hesitantly. She continued:

I would point you to, for instance, Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion in [2004’s Vieth v. Jubelirer] which has an extensive discussion of how it can actually do good things for our system to have districts drawn in a way that makes it easier for voters to understand who … the legislature is. It produces values in terms of accountability that are valuable so that the people understand who isn’t and who is in power.​

“I really don’t understand what that means,” Sotomayor responded.

Neither do I, since Breyer’s Vieth dissent says pretty much the opposite of what Murphy claims. (When “the minority’s hold on power is purely the result of partisan manipulation,” Breyer wrote, the legislature has engaged in “a serious, and remediable, abuse, namely … unjustified entrenchment.”) As legal analyst Mike Sacks noted on Twitter, Murphy is an excellent attorney; if “such a simple question renders her into word salad, there’s a problem.”

Sotomayor then drilled down and posed an even sharper follow-up question to Murphy: “It’s OK to stack the decks so that for 10 years—or an indefinite period of time—one party, even though it gets a minority of votes, can get … the majority of seats?”. *Murphy’s response:

With all due respect, you know, I would certainly dispute the premise that the decks are stacked here. At the end of the day, what matters is how people vote in elections and that’s what’s going to determine the outcomes, as it has in Wisconsin where the Republicans have won majorities because they’ve actually won the majority of the vote in most of the elections over the past four years.​

While the words in this paragraph did have the benefit of cohering into intelligible English sentences, Murphy’s answer again made no sense.

[Wisconsin demonstrates the issue]:

• In 2014, Wisconsin Republicans received 52 percent of the vote and won 63 out of 99 seats in the State Assembly.​

• In 2016, they won the same percentage 52 percent of the statewide vote and captured 64 seats.​

Murphy’s rosy response was technically correct, but it elides the fact that Republicans won a bare majority of votes overall yet captured a near-supermajority of assembly seats. Moreover, she conveniently ignored the 2012 election from her response. Perhaps that’s because in 2012, Wisconsin Republicans won just 48.6 percent of the statewide vote—and captured 60 out of 99 seats. That’s what a stacked deck looks like.

This is far from the first time that Sotomayor has put a resourceful advocate in a very tight spot. The justice performed a similar trick at her very first Supreme Court oral arguments in Citizens United, when she interrogated Floyd Abrams about the dubious wisdom of corporate personhood. Many conservatives spurn Sotomayor as a minor intellect, sometimes out of racism, but frequently due to a misunderstanding of her jurisprudential style. When questioning counsel, Sotomayor would rather zero in on factual flaws and spurious assumptions than spin out twisty doctrinal hypotheticals. While critics mistake this for a lack of sophistication, in actuality it shows her hunger to strike at the heart of the issue before the court with minimal pretension or delay.

Sotomayor’s barbed colloquy with Murphy laid bare the fundamental weakness in Wisconsin’s defense. The state cannot honestly justify its own gerrymandering; it can only insist that court intervention would somehow make the problem worse. As Gill demonstrates, Sotomayor might not always ask the most elaborate questions, just the most important ones.

*Correction, Oct. 5, 2017: This article originally misquoted Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She said that, in a politically gerrymandered state, the minority party can get a majority of seats in the legislature, not that they can’t. (Return.)


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/sonia_sotomayor_s_simple_devastating_question_in_gill_v_whitford.html


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Judges order North Carolina congressional districts redrawn quickly


By Steve Almasy, CNN
Tue January 9, 2018


171004150340-what-is-gerrymandering-expl-orig-nws-00014814-exlarge-169.jpg




STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Opinion is first time federal court has ruled on partisan gerrymandering
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Politicians should not pick their voters
(CNN) Federal judges said Tuesday that North Carolina will have to quickly redraw its 13 congressional districts because the map is unconstitutionally partisan.

The three-judge panel rejected the previous map drawn by the Republican-controlled General Assembly, saying it violates the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, and Article I of the Constitution.

The judges gave the state about three weeks to file a new plan with the court so it will be in place before the 2018 midterms.

The opinion is the first federal court ruling to strike down a congressional map as representing a partisan gerrymander.

In 2016 two districts in North Carolina were struck down because judges said the map was racially discriminatory.

Ralph Hise, North Carolina's state Senate redistricting chairman, told Reuters through a spokeswoman that Republicans would appeal.

Judge James A. Wynn of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote the majority opinion. "...Partisan gerrymandering runs contrary to numerous fundamental democratic principles and individual rights," he wrote.


Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina GOP, directed his ire at Wynn, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

"This is a hostile takeover of the #NCGA and legislative bodies across the US," he tweeted. "It is incredibly disappointing activist Judge Jim Wynn is waging a personal, partisan war on North Carolina Republicans."

The head of the state's Democratic party applauded the decision.

"Today's ruling is a major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans' unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage," Chairman Wayne Goodwin said. He called on the legislature to draw "fair, nonpartisan maps that give North Carolina voters a voice."

The case is not the only significant gerrymandering issue before the courts.

The US Supreme Court is considering a legislative redistricting case from Wisconsin and later will hear a complaint from Republicans in Maryland.

The General Assembly is the bicameral legislature of North Carolina, consisting of a House and Senate. Republican lawmakers hold the majority in both houses and have enough members to override any vetoes by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

North Carolina voting has been nearly split along partisan lines in recent statewide elections -- such as for governor and president -- but Republicans control 10 US House seats compared with three for Democrats.

The state has the 10th largest delegation in Congress.

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who has actively spoken against gerrymandering since the change of administrations, also called for "fair maps."

"Today's ruling was just the latest example of the courts telling state legislators in North Carolina that citizens should be able to pick their representatives, instead of politicians picking their voters," he said in a statement released by the National Democratic Redistricting Foundation.

CNN's Ariane De Vogue, Tammy Kupperman and Janet DiGiacomo contributed to this report.


http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/09/politics/north-carolina-gerrymandering-case/index.html


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

EXAMPLE OF PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING:



[Wisconsin demonstrates the issue]:

• In 2014, Wisconsin Republicans received 52 percent of the vote and won 63 out of 99 seats in the State Assembly.

• In 2016, they won the same percentage 52 percent of the statewide vote and captured 64 seats.

Republicans won a bare majority of votes overall yet captured a near-supermajority of assembly seats. Moreover, she conveniently ignored the 2012 election from her response. Perhaps that’s because in 2012, Wisconsin Republicans won just 48.6 percent of the statewide vote—and captured 60 out of 99 seats. That’s what a stacked deck looks like.



 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Extreme Partisan Gerrymandering: The Supreme Court's Play In 3 Acts


NPR
March 28, 2018
Heard on Morning Edition
NINA TOTENBERG



Maryland’s Redistricting Fight
The Supreme Court will be hearing arguments over the redistricting that led to Maryland’s 6th District swinging in favor of Democrats.
maryland.svg

MD-6

Credit: Hilary Fung/NPR


The curtain rises Wednesday on Act II of Extreme Partisan Gerrymandering, a play in three acts currently playing at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Act I opened the first week in October when the nine justices heard arguments in a case testing whether there is any constitutional limit to partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing legislative district lines to maximize and perpetuate the power of the incumbent party. At issue in the case is the Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature — a design that delivered nearly two-thirds of the districts to the GOP even as Republicans lost the statewide vote.




Act II opens Wednesday, as the court hears arguments in a second gerrymandering case. This one is from Maryland, and the justices decided to review it more than two months after the arguments in the Wisconsin case were completed. Just why the court added the second case, and so much later, is unclear. Speculation has centered on two theories — one legal and one political.

The political explanation was spurred by a comment from Chief Justice John Roberts during the Wisconsin arguments. "If you're the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision" and the Democrats win, he speculated, "the intelligent man on the street is going to say, 'It must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans.' ... And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.



Now, as it happens, while the Wisconsin case involves a redistricting that strongly favors the Republicans (although only at the state legislative district level), the Maryland redistricting under scrutiny Wednesday favors the Democrats. The Democratic leadership in the state drew the congressional district lines to make it more difficult for the GOP to prevail in one of the two traditionally Republican congressional districts in the state. The result is that today just one of Maryland's eight members of Congress is a Republican.

The bottom line is it could be that optics are part of the reason the court added a second partisan gerrymandering case to its docket, so that in one case, the Republicans could prevail, and in the other, the Democrats could.

Equal protection or free speech?

There are other differences between the two cases. The Maryland challengers object to only one district's design, while the Wisconsin challengers object to the whole state's redistricting. That said, drawing new lines for one district, would, of necessity, have ripple effects, changing the lines in others.



Another difference is the major legal argument. The Wisconsin challengers argue that extreme gerrymandering deprived Democratic Party voters of the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Constitution, while the Maryland challengers contend that the gerrymander there deprives Republicans of their First Amendment rights by making their speech, their votes, less valuable. But each of these arguments feeds into the other. And statistical analyses suggest that each argument, if adopted, would produce pretty much the same results.

The First Amendment argument, however, appeals, in particular, to the justice whose vote is likely to decide the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 2004, he provided the fifth vote for the court staying out of partisan gerrymandering cases, but he made it clear that he remained open to finding a way to measure what is unconstitutional gerrymandering based on party and he specifically mentioned the First Amendment notion that government action cannot punish people based on partisan affiliation.


Election expert Rick Hasen, of the University of California, Irvine, said that Kennedy, 81, knows he will not be on the court forever.

"It's put-up-or-shut-up time," Hasen said. "Either he's going to say, 'We've got to start policing this' or he has to recognize that what is going to happen in the next round in 2020 is going to look a lot worse than in this round, that it's going to be no-holds-barred, squeeze out whatever you can, in favor of your party and against the other party."

Act III of this drama? Well, that is likely to come in June when the Supreme Court finishes writing it.





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