We begin today's roundup with
The Arizona Republic and and its analysis of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold citizen efforts to combat gerrymandering:
The Supreme Court said politicians can't "disempower" the people from setting election boundaries.
A 5-4 ruling left the job of redistricting to the people.
In a decision that will preserve stability in the 2016 election and honor the will of the people, the court left Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission in charge of drawing congressional district maps. [...] Perfect may be impossible. But given the choice between a Legislature where party labels are paramount, and a commission intended to be independent, Arizona voters chose the latter. They wanted something different.
The Supreme Court says it is an experiment the people of Arizona have every right to try.
The Los Angles Times:
The point of redistricting reform is to ensure that elections more fully express the will of voters, not the parties. It is a work in progress that will continue to be refined as long as party leaders seek power and voters push back.
Bonnie Reiss, director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy:
There's still a lot of work to do. Today, only six of the 50 states have tackled gerrymandering head on. Redistricting reform is not a sexy issue, and progress is often slow and labor intensive. California failed to pass redistricting reform many times before it finally won. Politicians are generally hostile to changing a system that benefits them once they are in office.
But direct democracy and common sense allowed the people of California to act when their leaders were unwilling to. Fortunately, the Supreme Court stood with the people and states that allow direct democracy when politicians fail to act.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Pema Levy at Mother Jones:
By siding with Arizona's commission, the court acknowledged the problem of partisan gerrymandering. "[W]hen the district-drawing process is controlled by elected officials, the result too often is a process dominated by self-interest and partisan manipulation," political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in an amicus brief supporting the independent commission in the case. "By insulating redistricting decisions from direct partisan influence, commissions like Arizona’s offer a crucial first step toward breaking the cycle of partisanship and dysfunction perpetuated by legislative gerrymandering. The States’ efforts to use such commissions to tackle one of America’s most intractable political problems have great potential and are fully consistent with the States’ traditional role as laboratories of democracy." The Supreme Court agreed.
Law professor
Richard Pildes at The New York Times:
Direct democracy is hardly a panacea or a pure expression of “the popular will,” whatever that means; voters must be organized and informed, which takes resources and organizational skill. Still, direct democracy remains an important means of policing the inevitable temptations those in power have to entrench themselves more securely in power.
On Monday the court rightly recognized that, when the Constitution assigned the elections clause power to the “legislatures,” the framers were not making a judgment about whether states could create direct democratic processes as another way to regulate the national election process. Unlike their rejection of popular Senate elections, the framers did not reject popular regulation of elections: They just never considered the idea. To reject it in their name, the court wisely concluded, would have been perverse.
The Washington Post:
Usually we are skeptical of voter efforts to assume the functions of elected lawmakers. But gerrymandering is a special case because those who were elected through a slanted process have strong incentives to perpetuate that process. The unsurprising result is brazen electoral map manipulation, visible in the contorted districts that Republicans drew in North Carolina and Democrats drew in Maryland, to name just two of many. [...]
Reining in gerrymandering wouldn’t solve all of the country’s problems — not even all of the problems in how it conducts elections. But reform is in the national interest, and the Supreme Court has pointed the way forward.
Switching topics,
Robert Redford calls for more action on climate change:
I believe climate change is the defining environmental issue of our time. It's hurting our people -- around the world -- and it's time to stand up and say we've had enough. Enough of rising seas and widening deserts that threaten our homes and our crops. Enough of withering drought and blistering heat that mean more malnutrition and disease. Enough of raging floods, wildfires and storms that threaten people everywhere with one disaster after another. [...]
We're making real progress. Now it's time to step up the game and expand our team.
President Barack Obama has pledged to cut our carbon pollution and others of the so-called greenhouse gases that are warming our planet by up to 28% over the next 10 years.
That's a good start, and our friends around the world are watching.
The Des Moines Register says Obamacare opponents need to move on:
Though the law is not perfect, opponents' never-ending challenges create uncertainty for individual Americans, states, businesses, hospitals, doctors and the U.S. economy. Their more than 50 attempts in Congress to repeal or defund Obamacare have been unsuccessful. The Supreme Court has twice sided with the Obama administration in lawsuits. There is public support for major provisions in the law.
The most compelling reason for opponents to stop challenging the law: It is working for average people.