OPT, but
“Read The Article Not Just The Headline”
Jeet: That Daily Beast article links to a WaPo article with a headline that is different, but pretty much just as bad. There is absolutely no length ANY of the MSM’s “news” outlets will go to in order to protect the plutocrats that own them. The false narrative of internal Dem strife over the costs (political and financial) of “liberal policies” is apparently acceptable to fabricate even for the “news” sources we consider our allies.
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Those are words. I understand all those words individually, but together, I get about as much sense out of them as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
Exactly. And that is going to tend to perpetuate the problem, as I hope Justice Roberts is suggesting he understands. A party gets power in the legislature and then uses that power to grossly skew the district lines to give them a disproportionate majority. And they can then use that disproportionate majority to vote down any attempt to reform the line-drawing process. Same with Congress as with the state legislature. Republicans have more seats in the House than they ought to have because of the skewed way district lines have been drawn in Republican-controlled state legislatures (which is most of the states). So if only state legislatures or Congress can remedy the problem, Democrats are screwed unless demographics shrinks the GOP to a very small minority of voters.
A piece I heard on the radio on the NC redistricting said that in terms of registered voters, the state is split pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats. But the Congressional delegation is split 10 Republicans to 3 Democrats. And if you don’t think that’s almost entirely due to extreme partisan gerrymandering, take a look at how they have drawn the 12th district (which was first added after the 1990 census) ever since it first appears. (It’s the district in hot pink on the map here).
The CPVI rating of the 3 Democratic districts are 2 districts D+17, the third is D+18. Packing squared.
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Thank you for that clarification. It always drives me a little bit crazy when slave states are given the entire blame for that formulation. The full truth is that the 3/5 formula was borrowed from a compromise that was made in drawing up the Articles of Confederation, except that there the issue was taxation, and the positions of the states with large numbers of slaves vs those with fewer slaves (because all of them had some at that point) was reversed. Taxation was apportioned among the states based on population, and the states with large slave populations didn’t want slaves counted toward their tax apportionment at all, while states with relatively few slaves felt that would give them an unfair proportion of the tax burden. Somehow they settled on giving slave populations a weight of 3/5 toward counting the total taxable population. When the same issue about how to count slaves came up at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, that 3/5 compromise was a fairly easy one to sell, since they had all agreed on it before.
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And conveniently ignoring that the 14th and 15th Amendments put constraints on how far the states are allowed to go in addressing things on their own. And that those Amendments were put there because the states had demonstrated that they couldn’t be trusted to be fair, especially when it came to dealing with minority populations.
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Republican Justices are experts at ignoring anything, including their own prior decisions, which may interfere with returning the “right” determination.
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One suggestion I heard recently pointed out that the North Carolina Congressional districts are more skewed in favor of Republicans than 99+% of all of the districts drawn by computer based only on non-partisan criteria like compactness, equal size, and keeping communities together. So that gives a measure to determine the degree of partisanship in the drawing of the lines. So then the question becomes one of what degree of partisanship is acceptable.
It occurs to me as I write this that Madison and most of the others involved in putting the Constitution together were very negative on the whole idea of political parties (which they referred to as “factions”) and that they thought they were putting together a plan that would minimize the tendency to form parties. So for people like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to argue that the Framers were OK with the idea of extreme partisan gerrymandering because they gave the job of redistricting to the state legislatures is ridiculous.
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That’s why we call them “originalists” – because their reasoning is sure “original,” as a nice art teacher might compliment a drawing by a kindergartener.
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Who among us would ever have guessed that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would pursue a “cynical line of questioning/”?
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Jeet has been doing a good job in the guest seat.
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This is why we have to win in 2020 and need to win big at the state level. After the 2020 Census comes another round of redistricting and we need Governors,Lt. Governors and state legislature majorities. If Repubs are in charge of that again,we are truly f**ked!
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There it is.
Every time I’m reminded that there’s a rapist on the SC, I want to puke. Then I read his arguments for gerrymandering, which he’s only giving because gerrymandering is a right wing thing these days, and I want to puke even more.
If there is ANY justice in the world, Kav will die choking on a hotdog and beer.
THEN I’ll ‘like beer’!
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This kind of move is one of their favorites on big, societal questions that did not come up for a long time after the founding. I remember when they simultaneously argued that maybe gay marriage shouldn’t be decided by them because it was too soon for the country to handle and that maybe they shouldn’t decide it because states were already passing laws so ehat difference could they make. The double bind works fine for them because it ensures that power and the status quo wins. It requires you to believe that refusing to decide is not a decision that requires a justification. “Leaving it to the legislature” is just as much a judicial act as any other. Deciding not to decide or to leave things in place just means you authorize partisan gerrymandering. The choices are to say such gerrymandering is constitutional or to say it is not; each carries an equal burden of persuasion. This is an argument some scholars and some lawyers have been impressing upon the court for a century now.
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I love “as bad as” claims.
If Clinton was responsible for failing to win Wisconsin because she didn’t campaign there, why did Feingold suffer as well (presumably he was campaigning in WI during the election)?
So…coattails aren’t a thing now?
If Clinton had campaigned in WI and stoked voter enthusiasm for her campaign, would that not have helped Feingold?
If all it took was campaigning in the district, Feingold should have won while Clinton should have lost.
I really wish people took basic courses in logic. Necessity isn’t sufficiency. COME ON!
I did take logic. It was a reductio ad absurdum argument. The point was that your premise that Clinton campaigning in WI would have been sufficient to eke out a win was specious. You ignored the actual pertinent points of my post. The polling shows that she (and Feingold) held leads up until the Comey letter. Comey’s letter appears to have been far more consequential than whether or not she campaigned there.
It’s such a goofy argument and you also opted to ignore my counterpoint about PA where she did campaign and still barely lost. Obviously, there are more factors at play than the simplistic argument about where she did or did not campaign. I honestly don’t understand why anyone is still trying to make that argument since it’s ultimately insulting to Wisconsinites, accusing them of being fickle, feckless children who storm off in a tantrum if they don’t get all the attention that they feel they deserve. Presumably these people are adults and can be expected to understand that a candidate can’t be everywhere in a country of 300 million people.
Congressional Districts are federal. The FEC should be running the whole show when it comes to electing the president and members of Congress. There are no “states’ rights” involved.
Hey, and just because it’s being done by a computer it doesn’t mean that computer needs to be connected to the Internet.
It’s pretty easy as an algorithm would be doing the demarcation strictly by geography. None of this tortured, drunken Etchersketch nonsense.
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I’d recommend numerous heavy doses of antibiotics to prep the organs – you never know what a “conservative” has gotten themselves into … or put into themselves. 
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