Niemeyer is a Reagan appointee then HW appointee and now Trump loyalist who dissented when the appeals court upheld an injunction against Trump’s travel ban. However, don’t get too excited yet about this somehow blowing up in the GOP’s face. What I expect the Fascist Five to do is overturn this. Why? Because they DESPERATELY want to rule that gerrymandering is ok if it is partisan gerrymandering…and as long as any disparate impact on minorities or other protected classes is “merely incidental” or some shit like that. I fully expect them to bemoan that ruling otherwise, i.e., ruling to protect minorities against gerrymandering them out of voting power, is oh so unfair because it only favors one side etc. This is the core of Roberts’ nonsensical philosophy on discrimination, affirmative action and legislation/law designed to protect minorities…a conniving, intellectually dishonest ideologue when it comes to the subject and who makes tautological quips that ignore practical reality such as “the only way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating” and who pretends systemic, deeply institutionalized racism is over in Amurikkka etc.
Can we not get a panel of geographers and geographical information systems professionals to do this and get it out of the hands of the political types?
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said in a statement last week that the judges’ decision confirms that Maryland has “the most gerrymandered districts in the country.”
Not even close, asswipe.
Consider Ohio: Democratic candidates for Congress received 2,047,760 votes of the 4,095,557 votes cast. That’s almost bang-on 50% of the votes cast (49.995% if you want to be pedantic about it.) How did the races break? Twelve to three, in favor of the Republicans. If the districts were drawn to be competitive, we’d expect the break to 8-7 or 9-6 and to flip among the parties. If it were a coin toss, we’d expect a 12-3 break in favor of the Republicans less than 2% of the time. Instead, we now have four straight elections under this gerrymandered map where the Republicans get 3/4 of the seats with 1/2 of the vote.
I understand that Maryland’s congressional maps are unfair. It’s just that I don’t care, because Republicans have made it necessary to play this game. Get the Republicans in other states with egregiously bad maps to start acting right first and get the Republicans who’ve already been slapped down in NC and WI to start complying and then maybe we can talk about it.