Signs indicate the SCOTUS will issue rulings against the US Constitution’s equal protection clause (14th amendment) citing Article 1 of the US Constitution. In effect they will be negating the equal protection clause; they will be hiding behind this:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
To protect against SCOTUS making that decision, they must know that Democrats will see this as the new rules by which the US Constitution is interpreted and will implement aggressive gerrymanders of their own throughout the country.
Republicans must know that this ruling will lead to vast expansion of gerrymandering to blue states to nullify what they’ve done in red states. They must know that demographics are not on their side and they will lose badly in the long run by making unfair anti-democratic gerrymandering the law of the land.
The fact that Democrats in California for example have not responded by at least threatening to undo their nonpartisan districting is an example of Democrats bringing a knife to a gun fight.
It is time for Democrats to fight fire with fire.
This must not happen
The Court has added new cases and issued orders in others—recent moves that make advocates of more open elections nervous.
Those gerrymander butterflies come after an early January Supreme Court hearing in a case about the GOP’s overly aggressive voter purges in Ohio, which investigative reporters at Reuters showed were aimed at undermining the state's urban-centered Democratic turnout. In that case, too, the Court’s swing justices appeared to ignore the purge's partisan motives.
Taken together, the signals—as seen in orders in gerrymandering cases and comments from the bench during the Ohio voter purge case—suggest the Supreme Court could soon issue what could be anti-democratic rulings affecting the 2018 election, the 2020 election and the drawing of political maps for the 2020 decade.
www.alternet.org/...
Update:
And now is the time to make repubs squirm and perhaps quietly ask SCOTUS to undo their gerrymandering so they don’t have to appease their fascist base voters who don’t give a shit about anti democractic gerrymandering. Here’s some leverage:
For Republicans in the states, the political warning signs keep mounting: In Virginia, it was an electoral shellacking that nearly snapped their 20-year grip on the State House. In Wisconsin, it was a midwinter rout in a special election for the State Senate, fought in a conservative district.
And in Pennsylvania, it has been an exodus of state legislators from the Philadelphia area, where more than half a dozen Republicans have opted for retirement over a strenuous campaign in 2018.
“It looks like it’s going to be a war zone,” said State Representative Gene DiGirolamo, a moderate Republican, of his native Bucks County, a spacious suburb on the New Jersey border.
www.nytimes.com/...