The absence of spines helps.
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Maybe yes. Maybe no.
My personal focus right now is on the Electoral College and how some (if any) would react to a SCOTUS attempting to cut off vote counts to intentionally favor Trump. Regardless of party affiliations, I don’t see any state government actually wanting precedents established for that kind of Federal interference. For example, would the electorates of a ‘blue state’ — well aware of mail-in votes being choked off and suppressed by Trump and DeJoy — vote to cast their votes to Biden whatever the count on election day? Going further, would any ‘red states’ effectively follow suit (especially if they tally up all their votes — including “late” votes — which show instead a Biden win) … if for no other reason than to send a message to any future Dem-majority SCOTUS?
(BTW: Frustration and anger being so high right now, I fully expect one or more BBers here to conclude that I’m posing strong possibilities… then overreact in keeping with those conclusions. I certainly hope not, though; I’m only posing possibilities; things to consider.)
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Have you forgotten Bush v. Gore already? That’s exactly what happened there.
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Oh that’s simple:if a district voted republican as of election day, ballots collected later are all suspect. If, however, that district went to the democrats, then those votes are vital.
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Well this is the problem with discussions like this. I honestly don’t think you think that at all because I don’t think you are an idiot. (And I hope you don’t think I am either, but I wouldn’t blame you because I too am reduced to short-ish commenting without proper context in these sort of formats. Especially when I was trying to be a bit jokey and it didn’t work.) And, of course, the other problem is that I’m writing from the other side of the Atlantic where we’ve taken the whole problem another step further, by having a binary electoral system but several viable parties, meaning that we don’t even need gerrymandering to produce even more wildly distorted results.
I am pretty sure we probably violently agree actually. I think that the problem runs deeper than just constitutional though, but that’s a massive part of it. Reforming the system may need more than just figuring out how to enable everyone to be able to participate in democratic processes; they need to be able to participate in all the other parts of society too.
Those “poison pills” don’t sound very poisonous.
[In]severability is only as enforceable as the court is willing to enforce it.
The most informed scholarship on the topic finds Congress has the power to control districting pursuant to its Article I, section 4 power over elections.
“Most informed scholarship” my (no-longer-that-)skinny white ass. Article I section 4, by its terms, allows Congress to override State legislative decisions on the time, place, and manner of Senate and House elections. A textualist Court would strike down any congressional re-gerrymandering faster than you can say “Amy Bony Carrot.”
This opinion piece is based on the incorrect notion that the other side plays not just by rules, but by the same rules we’ve been playing by.
If the Dems win both houses and the presidency, they’d better respond by (1) killing the filibuster, (2) making DC a state, and (3) packing the fuck out of the courts, in that order, ideally by the end of January 2021.
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While I certainly applaud the sentiment, I just can’t bring myself to understand how a 6-7% polling-lead and a 79% probability of winning (according to 538) translates to “going down like a POS” 
Just sounds like someone going way out of their way to set themselves up for disappointment…!
Only because Congress left it entirely to them in the Reapportionment Act of 1929 – previous versions of the act left it to the states, but with stipulations on district size, compactness, and contiguousness. There’s no reason a new reapportionment act couldn’t reintroduce similar stipulations.
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I think you’d have an uphill constitutional battle with that. Since districting is not mentioned in any way in the Constitution, it falls under the purview of each state, as described by the 10th amendment.
Better still. Why not just appoint EVERYONE? That should head off the objection that judicial activism makes judges unelected tyrants. If everyone’s a tyrant…
I’m not a lawyer, but I do know the Supreme Court has most definitely held that the 14th amendment has implications for redistricting (and not just in the context of the civil rights movement), and has explicitly recognized federal statutes on apportionment (which have existed and been regularly updated from 1792 to 1929). So I’m not convinced it would really be an uphill battle, there seems to be lots of legal precedent to work with. Still, I believe there is also precedent for the Court overturning itself on federal reapportionment statutes, so a revised reapportionment act might be a good place to leave a “poison pill,” though I don’t really have any suggestions as to what an effective one might be.
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