We begin today’s roundup with law professor Richard Hasen’s analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold extreme partisan gerrymandering:
The Supreme Court decision on Thursday in Rucho v. Common Causepurports to take federal courts out of the business of policing partisan gerrymanders and leave the issue for states to handle. But the decision will instead push federal courts further into the political thicket, and, in states with substantial minority voter populations, force courts to make logically impossible determinations about whether racial reasons or partisan motives predominate when a party gerrymanders for political advantage. It didn’t have to be this way. [...]
The decision comes as the problem of gerrymandering has grown much worse, for two reasons. First, technological improvements have allowed line drawers to use sophisticated software and demographic analysis to create ever more effective gerrymanders. Even in wave elections, some of these gerrymanders will let a party preferred by a minority of voters capture a majority of seats. This is not theoretical. It has happened again and again.
The New York Times:
Besides North Carolina and Maryland, this ruling will have implications for court decisions that had thwarted gerrymandering in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — all of which could be overturned, largely to the benefit of Republicans at the federal and state levels.
If there’s any comfort from Thursday’s ruling, it is that both the majority and the dissent acknowledged that Congress and the states must pick up the mantle of advancing democracy and promoting fairness in elections. But that comfort is small: Despite efforts at the state level to create independent redistricting commissions and increase access to the ballot box, entrenched state Republican and Democratic majorities will have an incentive, thanks to the Supreme Court, to draw districts to preserve their political capital — and stick it to voters in the process.
On the census decision, The Washington Post calls for Trump to abandon any efforts to add the citizenship question:
THERE IS a familiar, and crude, retort people sometimes make to attempted lies, which we will paraphrase as follows: “Don’t pour water on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” That old saw also summarizes the Supreme Court’s wise controlling opinion that blocked, at least temporarily, the Trump administration’s attempted inclusion of a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census. [...]
Mr. Roberts correctly opined that there is nothing intrinsically unconstitutional or unlawful about including a citizenship question in the census; it has been done many times before in U.S. history. What he and the other members of the majority recognized, though, is that how government goes about including such a question makes all the difference.
Here’s USA Today’s take on the matter:
What to do now? For one, some blowback would not be out of order. The Supreme Court deserves respect, but not immunity from sharp criticism. The 1858 Dred Scott decision, for instance, galvanized the abolitionist movement. And the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has been a unifying force for anti-abortion activists.
With gerrymandering, the most powerful available tool is the ballot initiative. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the people within a given state have the right at the ballot box to create bipartisan commissions to draw fair and reasonable political boundaries.
Ballot initiatives are not a perfect solution. Some states don’t have them. And at least one — Missouri — has shown a willingness to ignore them.
David Faris at The Week argues that these cases show the need for Supreme Court reform:
[Democrats] must cordon the five conservatives in a kind of always-lose district by expanding the Court's membership to 11 or 13 or whatever it takes to achieve the long-thwarted liberal majority. If they don't, they will watch every serious policy they want get subjected to TEGWAR (The Exciting Game Without Any Rules) by Federalist Society zealots at all levels of the court system. Does anyone doubt that despite his seemingly good-faith call for Congress to eliminate gerrymandering, that any kind of national law seeking to overturn the practice would make its way back to the Roberts Court? Does anyone trust this court to do the right thing?
The answer is no.
Former Democratic Congressman Steve Israel and former Republican Congressman Zach Wamp add their insight:
Gerrymandering isn’t new, of course. It was first used in 1812 to draw Massachusetts state legislative districts that were signed into law by then-Governor and future Vice President Elbridge Gerry. What is relatively new is the repudiation of compromise by the very large number of incumbents who fear a primary over a general-election challenge. Today’s Supreme Court decision will give those incumbents no reason to change that calculus, and in fact could embolden them and further inflame the partisan divide.
We both served in Congress, on opposing sides, and each felt these pressures every day we were in office.
The good news is that the process is being corrected at the state and local levels.
On a final note, don’t miss Paul Krugman’s latest on labels, language and more:
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats’ “socialist” agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.
To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to the truth than calling Democrats socialists.