Hypothetical question. Which is more damaging to the future of this country?
Gerrymandering?
or
The Electoral College?
“The Supreme Court Won’t Stop Partisan Gerrymandering. Now What?”
Now what?
Vote, of course!
In every single local, state, and federal election.
(School board and dogcatcher included.)
If 2018 proved anything, it’s that a big enough wave can overcome even gerrymandered R+ districts.
Yes. Both.
Actually I believe the Electoral College is so undemocratic that it must be eliminated. Wyoming two senators, California two senators.
Instead of “one person, one vote,” we now have, per North Carolina, “one Democrat, one vote; one Republican, six votes.” Perhaps the Roberts Court will reconsider (and do they ever reconsider!) the “one person, one vote” rule from the 1960’s Court, and allow legislatures to redistrict on any basis at all, irrespective of population.
The good old days before 1960; or, perhaps, redistricting on the basis of “one acre, one vote.”
Now what? Now we do what the fascists did, and start taking over local political offices until we’ve built enough momentum to take the state legislatures, then we gerrymander the bastards out of existence.
Oh, yes. We also impeach Roberts, Alittle, Gorsuck, Kabin-nah, and that ultimate a$$hole Thomas.
Yes VOTE and turnout every single voter you can turnout. It defeats gerrymandering.
Especially for state elections because that’s where this happens - in the state legislatures.
And once we have the wherewithal, we gerrymander the GOP out of fucking existence. We obliterate them.
I am not kidding.
The problem with the EC is that it is effectively a form of gerrymandering. It establishes arbitrary cohorts, and then amplified or diminished the political power of each by “compressing” popular votes into EC votes using a lossy formula. It’s made worse because the EC recapitulates the fundamentally anti-majoritarian allocation of Senators to states.
The first thing to do, long before the votes can be cast, is to organize. Eric Holder heads an organization called All on the Line, dedicated to electing more Democrats to state legislatures. I’ve put off contributing, but now i will. If you live in a red or a purple state, get involved in a local state representative or state senate election. Back a good Democratic candidate, or round one up, or run yourself.
All excellent advice. Liked x milllions
Congress can fix the EC by increasing the size of the House to 650 (the size of Parliament) or even to 1,000, and it can admit DC and PR as states.
To extend what Jimmy Carter said today, no rulings by an illegitimate supreme court should be allowed to have a long term impact on the US. All Trump nominees should be impeached and all Trump executive orders overturned based on the illegitimacy of his presidency. This supreme court should be granted no authority while it persists in being an illegally appointed body. Trump is not a valid President, and nothing he does should be legally binding.
I totally agree with you.
Chief Justice Roberts argues that, “courts aren’t equipped to come up with a standard to determine when gerrymanders go too far.”
Standards? How about:
One man one vote.
Equal justice under the law.
Political equity, racial equity, gender equity, etc.
You won’t find a judicial remedy unless you make an effort, and Justice Roberts, I see no effort here on your part.
Really, the key thing in 2020 is to get enough Democrats into state governorships and legislative offices that the Republicans can’t do whatever they want when creating the maps for 2022. In some states it’s not important anymore, as there are nonpartisan committees now in charge of it, in the rest the Democrats need to have a seat at the table to make sure the results are fairly drawn. Do that, and voting for the next decade will follow what the people want…and, I know it’s tempting to try to take over and shove Republicans aside, but really we need to make them fair to hold the moral high ground, that’s worth not maximizing seats.
Beyond that, the two most important elections are for president and senator of Kentucky…Democrats really need to pull out all the stops to win both races. As bad as Trump is, McConnell is far worse for democracy in this nation, and he needs to be out of office, or at least out of the Senate majority. If Democrats take the Senate back, they need to develop a way to remove the filibuster and then shove the good democracy bills through. I also like the idea of increasing the SC to 13 judges (one for each appellate court), to balance the load and make it so one SC judge is the top of each chain below it. Add in giving DC statehood, and PR if they still want it, and things go a long ways towards more balance in the system.
Yep, Roberts is completely wrong to say courts aren’t equipped to come up with a standard, several have, and several more adopted standards that were developed by academics. There are plenty of ways to say a system is unfair to voters, or ways to define the process to attempt to keep it somewhat equitable, so saying it can’t be done was BS, and cover to allow Republicans to continue to hold onto power. The Rehnquist and Roberts courts will go down as anti-democracy engines when the history is written.
Byallthingsgodly: you want to solve this?
WIN ELECTIONS. (Stop. Think. Read that again.)
It is certainly true that gerrymandering – or more precisely, the exponentially more powerful modern tools for representatives to pick their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives – is a serious threat to self-government.
But, why oh why, don’t folks examine why that is so? What is it with folks on the left insisting the courts, the courts will save us?
There are various Constitutionally-legit reasons to draw districts this way, not that, and they are all controlled by people who win elections. So the sensible place to start is to realize the essential condition driving this mess is that it is zero-sum: we haven’t added a US Representative since 1911. We’ve tripled the population, added two whole states and four US Senators – but the House is still 435. That limit even survived the end of Jim Crow, which was the reason it was created in the first place.
BREAK IT. Make the apportionment of US representation into a plus-sum game, and you can offer deals to the dozens, if not hundreds of people who win elections who will actually make the decision.
Stop trying to turn 'em into an episode of Survivor.
The media coverage for this abomination was appropriately abominable.
TWO extremist anti-democracy rulings were in front of the Court and the media presented it as “fair” that Roberts only passed one of them.
In the mid-2020s when there is hopefully a super-majority Democratic Congress, I’d like to see the (Democratic) President demote Roberts and appoint a new Chief Justice.
Maybe Democrats ought to try what they haven’t tried in a long time. Get out of their gentlemanly agreed lane and take the political fight to local Republicans. Start winning elections in the suburbs. Maybe the Democratic billionaires should do what the Republican billionaires have all done, buy media companies. Use local news departments to advance a pro-human being agenda instead of the racism so rampant in local news across the country. Maybe Democrats should try something the Republicans do every election in nearly every state in America, field and fund good quality candidates in state and local elections. I have read that Democrats aren’t even going to try to win retiring Pat Robert’s seat. The fix is already in for Mike Pompeo.
What Democrats need to do isn’t hard but it takes a lot of hard work.