Discussion: Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To GOP-Gerrymandered Map In Wisconsin

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Thanks for waiting 8 months to tell us you fucking assholes!

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We leave for another day ā€¦

When you are able to look at American politics in terms of geological time, itā€™s all good.

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So, the Court avoided the merits by dismissing for lack of standing. But it remanded the case to the lower court to give the plaintiffs a chance to meet the criteria for standing articulated by the Court. To demonstrate standing, the Court held that the voter must show legislative-district-specific harm to his interest in fair representation. Perhaps the plaintiffs counsel should amend the complaint to add plaintiffs from every legislative district, all of whom have been aggrieved by the legislative boundaries. That sounds laborious but doable.

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So, bring the case in the right way and we might consider it.

But, you wonā€™t have time to do it before 11/2018.

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This is the sickening reality we face; the conservative monsters who want to destroy democracy are doing it like this; theyā€™re winning in the weeds where itā€™s hard to see how corrosive it is. Itā€™s the same tactic used by crazy evangelical extremists who get on school boards and other local agencies in order to indoctrinate children and gullible citizens with their poisonous superstitions (religion). This is really depressing.

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Welp, thatā€™s it then. Seems to me thereā€™s literally zero way to prove what theyā€™re asking under current precedent, so the country will indeed continue to sink into the fascist morass required to forcibly maintain minority rule.

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They had to make sure that Republican shenanigans survive another midterm.

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Exactly the point.

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Essentially a class action suit from citizens of every voting district in Wisconsin.

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Doable, yes, but how will it deal with the crux of the problem which is the aggregate effect of the partisan gerrymander: that a political party can so arrange district boundaries that it becomes impossible for them to lose control of the legislature even if the stateā€™s population votes overwhelmingly for the opposition?

Will we have to wait for such extraordinary cases ā€“ e.g., a party maintaining majority when the other party gets 75% of the total vote ā€“ that even a SCOTUS with a majority as deeply biased as this will have to accept it as a constitutional violation? Or will even that fail to force them to remove their blinders that a bunch of trees make a forest.

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So much for the principal of One Person, One Vote.

Though designed to balance districts, by ā€˜Cracking and Packingā€™ in the process of Gerrymandering, the Republicans have successfully walked around the law. Much of this is due to the evil of Karl Rove and we continue to suffer every election cycle.

The Republicans know they cannot win if the field of play is fair, so they will lie, cheat, and suppress every vote they can, through any means they can.

The Republic is at risk and no matter the outcome of this current administration, the real fight is at the ā€˜street level.ā€™

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So it looks like the Justices ā€œpuntedā€ this forcing it back to the lower courts and or forcing the plaintiffs to show ā€œindividual harmā€ which is a hell of a lot harder to do. It seems the SC is punting the most controversial of cases instead actually ruling on the merits of the case. Unbelievableā€¦ elections have consequences people. The conservatives on the court are the ones punting most of these court cases.

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I think they want actual proof of harm, something concrete, so it wouldnā€™t matter if they included other districts in their claim. The need for actual proof of ā€œindividualized harmā€ I think makes this a lot harder to show. Seems the SC is punting most of these controversial cases. This is like the third or fourth hotly debated case they have decided not to give an actual ruling on.

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So whatā€™s the purpose of doing a concurrence instead of a dissent when you donā€™t haven enough votes? Are concurrences part of the controlling text for lower courts?

So We Vote!

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I kind of understand the concept of standing. In this case it means, ā€œDonā€™t get us into this political thicket.ā€

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The Justices seem to be under the impression that the results of gerrymandering can be deduced by looking only at a single district. This is plainly nonsense - the effects of a gerrymander are often visible only when one looks at the totality of the scheme.

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Soā€¦are they only ā€˜puntingā€™ until AFTER the next election so the House and the Senate can still fk with the voters?

Roberts, in his opinion, wrote that the voters could only challenge the drawing of the specific districts in which they vote, and not the entirety of a stateā€™s map, as had been done in the Wisconsin case before the court, Gill v. Whitford.

Iā€™m not sure that Chief Justice Roberts understands the concept of a Representative Democracy. It is the ā€œentirety of the Stateā€™s mapā€ that is the problem.

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