This year a NC Legislature ballot initiative was struck down because still using illegeal maps from racial gerrymander. In short, an illegitimate Legislature put it on ballot. Feels like the only hope.
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William Jennings Bryan,1893, Lincoln Nebraska.
It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest; the only way to deal with him is to outvote him.
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I’ve never quite understood the seemingly arbitrary limit on the number of members of the US House.
Seems to me that the state with smallest population is the practical number for 1 Rep. That # is then divided into the population in each state to arrive at the size of their delegation rounding up to additional delegate @ +50% +1 person.
Sure, they’d need a new capitol bldg, but this is better representation. Oh, and I think we’ve now proved the Electoral College as a failed concept. At LEAST twice: W & Trump.
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Yes, we’ve got to GOTV. Does anyone know how successful Eric Holder or the DNC has been with GOTV?
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What’s to stop the Roberts Court from finding that an H.R. 1 solution of prohibiting gerrymandering is an unconstitutional breach of state’s rights, since it is up to the states to apportion the districts every 10 years?
Oh, right, nothing…
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Chief Political Hack in Robes, John Roberts, was hired to do a job. Any talk of his concern for the SCOTUS’ reputation is to give him enough cover from the national Press Corpse to do the corporate bidding.
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How can the states and state courts do the job if the federal courts can’t? Roberts rationale is patently absurd. Courts make similar judgments all the time.
The strained partisan efforts that included creating bizarrely shaped voting districts separated people with lots of shared interests best implemented through community cohesion. It dilutes the power if your vote.
Right now, one next step would be to bring an action arguing that the gerrymandering was done to affect minorities. There’s no guarantee of a win.
If every minority community of any size is swept into the same one or two voting districts, no matter their proximity, and in the absence of any discernible reason to join those communities other than one intended to dilute their their voting power, can the gerrymanders say they did it for political reasons because minorities rarely vote for Republicans? Would this make the distorted map ok?
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I don’t disagree that the EC has serious problems, but some people have suggested that if the number of reps were increased, it would help mitigate the EC problems as it would consequently be more representative than its current form. So your first idea might work to help with the second.
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In NC my dem vote counts about 50% of a pub vote. US House races see Dems cast 48-52% of gross votes and yet we only get 3 of 13 b/c our votes are so packed.
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And they’ve certainly got a plan for those 3, now that the Supremes said everything’s fine.
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The electoral college can be fixed (made moot) by the (forget name) Compact that awards the state’s EC votes to the national popular vote winner. The Compact is structured such that it does not go into effect until at least 270 EC votes worth of states sign on. When that happen the EC is dead and we can piss on its grave. Both bush the lesser and trumplethinskin were minority presidents. I think about 170 votes worth of states have signed on so far.
Now what?
Take power, by hook or by crook. 2022 is distinct possibility. Then in the space of 6 months:
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Scrap the filibuster.
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Pass HR1, banning gerrymandering.
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Grant statehood to DC and PR.
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Expand the Supreme Court to 15.
Within one year: nominate and confirm six Supreme Court justices.
If for whatever reason the GOP wins in Nov 2024, restore the filibuster and pass legislation in the lame-duck session preserving the filibuster. Also pass legislation halting further expansion of the Supreme Court. Neither of these laws are constitutional, but you know, elections have consequences and we now have a Supreme Court with 10-5 liberal majority.
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I anticipate something worse–a digital gerrymander. Now that the courts have blessed Republican
theft of elections, the quaint notion of contiguous House districts will be replaced by digital ones,
designed to maximize the ripoff. I suspect that in many states, such a purely mathematical
form of gerrymander could either put all democrats into one district (with the GOP getting
the remainder), or in some cases, make it impossible for the Dems to receive any representation
at all.
Combine this extreme distortion of the House vote with the already non-democratic Senate
(where GOP states like Wyoming, with half a million voters have the same number of senators as Dem states like California, with 40 million and you have an entirely non-democratic legislative body.
Now couple that to a Judiciary that has been hijacked by the aforementioned non-democratic
senate AND you have the end of The Republic.
Campion
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It’s called the Law of Equal Proportions. Here’s how it works –
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Every state must have at least one Representative.
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No district covers more than one state.
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So you take whatever the # is (435 for the last century+), and subtract 50: that’s the 385 which gets divided among the 50 states according to population. California, as the largest state, has the most ostensibly fair # of Representatives, but most folks get confused cuz they compare California with Wyoming, instead of New Mexico (for example: 2.1 million people, and 3 US reps) with West Virginia (1,8 million people and also 3 US reps).
The marginal states aren’t Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming which only get one each. The truly marginal states might get one (like Delaware does now), but used to get two (like Delaware used to have) – basically, 1 million people either have one US rep (and are thus the least represented in the Union), or two (and are thus the most represented).
At various times (Utah before Y2k), there will be powerful Senators (like Hatch) who would be willing to add beyond 435 but only to protect that extra Rep for their state. But it’s always treated as a parochial issue – even as for 40 years, we’ve taken representation away from people who can and do vote (in the Northeast, like NY), and increased representation for people who can’t and don’t (Arizona).
I coined the phrase years ago, the “Connecticut Rule”: No state that gains population should lose a Representative.
Democrats should simply make this an issue, since after all this is the real reason we fought the Revolution: population compels representation.
And no, you don’t need a bigger building. Churchill made a point of rebuilding the House of Commons exactly the same size it had always been.
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Ahem, one person one vote.
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If the lines were drawn fairly, we wouldn’t have to. They’d be voted out of existence.
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“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.”
I used to agree, but with the GOP’s turn against democracy, I think the party must be disarmed completely so that we can have the kind of debate and politics that only happen with a shared sense of propriety. It’s become a case of negotiating with the political equivalent of terrorists.
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This is now a problem because the Republicans were finally successful in gerrymandering the Supreme Court.
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Delete the number of senators a state has from the number of electoral votes the state gets. That makes the EC vote far more representative of the number of voters in the state. As to standards for electoral districts, how about compact and contiguous with no unusual bulges or lobes that can’t be legitimately explained by some other reason than partisan gerrymandering?