USSC ain’t no PA Supreme Court.
That is a gerrymander, but isn’t a partisan gerrymander. The entire area you could reasonably use to draw a district in that area is heavily Democratic. The only R leaning district in that area is the sixth and it doesn’t show any signs of packing given that it is R+2. It was a racial gerrymander to comply with a court order to ensure Hispanic representation.
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Of everything I have seen from SCOTUS in the last 10 years this single decision, aside from citizens united, immediately enraged me and make me think true democracy is helpless and pointless in this country.
What a bunch of spineless sniveling worthless human beings.
I cannot believe the degree to which I am seeing democracy being destroyed in my lifetime in America
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But but, the Dems gerrymander too! 
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Yes and it’s bullshit no matter who does it.
Even though I am a registered Democrat it does not mean that I want or accept everything they do that is backwards too
There needs to be some sort of independent party that randomly redistricts the nation every 3 years. I would say software should do this in the form of some sort of supercomputer like deep blue, but the problem would be whoever writes that code would never be able to make it truly random.
I really think it needs to be said though regardless of who does it it should be quite clear conservatives are overwhelmingly abusing this to the nines
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Yeah, pretty much what i meant to imply.
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The way past this is for Democrats to take state legislatures, take the Senate, and take the White House.
Same plan as last week, and the week before that.
It wouldn’t hurt if a bolt of lightning hit McConnel.
(Well, it would hurt him, but not for very long.)
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Game over. Democracy in the United States is dead. This ensures it. The Republicans have won by rigging the game.
The thing about rigged games isn’t that the person running the scam is trying to tip the scale in their favor, it’s that the mark has no chance to win whatsoever. When the deck is stacked by the dealer, the dealer chooses who wins and who loses. There is no chance about it.
And here we are in the same condition in the game of US Democracy. The “game” has been completely fixed. The arbiters of the rules (SCOTUS) have said that anything goes when it comes to campaign contributions, gerrymandering, and selective disenfranchisement. Combined, that means that the Republican party has the tools to ensure that they will continue to win elections whether or not the majority of voters vote for their party and candidates. Selective disenfranchisement will help to ensure that they maintain that control.
There is a limit to how far gerrymandering can skew results. If a district is 80% Democrat voters gerrymandering can’t deliver a win to Republicans. The Republicans will fight that, though, by selectively disenfranchising groups who have a tendency to vote Democrat, especially racial minority groups. The Republican party and the conservative members of the SCOTUS have demonstrated numerous times that they do not actually believe in democracy and the doctrine of One Person, One Vote. This is yet another example. The masters of the Republican party are to blame but the voters who continue to vote for Republicans are complicit. I have no sympathy for any of them.
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And, pray tell, how do you propose winning those elections when the Republicans have been given the green light to gerrymander to their hearts’ desire and ensure that Democrats never win another election?
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“Democratic” gerrymandering, Ohio style: put all the Dems up north in one district.
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Wow, talk about your “Coastal Elites”.
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Secure that shit, Hudson.
All this means is the fight is as hard as it’s been since gerrymandering became a term to describe the effect.
It doesn’t change the amount of work or even the points you use when you help others get to the polls.
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They have not been given the green light here. SCOTUS punted to the states, where these tactics have been losing more often than standing when challenged in Court or subjected to ballot initiatives. More over there are a bunch of cases on the subject rolling through the lower courts. Each designed to challenge partisan gerrymandering or gerrymandering in general in slightly different ways.
They have generally skated through on a shrug. So long as they can plausibly maintain the fiction that their gerrymandering is purely partisan, and the court remains disinterested in clarifying whether gerrymandering on partisan grounds is legal. But that’s been slowly eroding even among conservative judges and Republican controlled courts.
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On a related theme…
https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1138210355837116416?s=21
https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1138210357065986049?s=21
https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1138210358345261057?s=21
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In other words: The supreme court should probably have a mandate to protect against X regardless of whether or not the constitution doesn’t explicitly say that X is Y.
That’s the legislative branch’s job. The SC’s job is to insure they are conforming to the constitution. It would be expedient to have the SC work that way, but then you’d have 9 people who serve for life creating law.
There’s some wiggle room where the constitution implicitly says something, but even that should be used judiciously (pun intended).
Sigh.
Punted back to a state whose current favorite thing is to take us back to 1860, before all the troubles started.
Once upon a time, Ohio had Republican leadership that tried to keep the state wealthy and with high employment rates. (How they did it is shrouded in the mists of history and the cloak of back-room dealing.) Now we have Republican leadership taking its governance straight out of the Bible and The Handmaid’s Tale.
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The legislative branch has clearly availed itself of this job. There’s a sentence in the bill of rights (amendment 9) to the effect of “this is not an exhaustive list of rights protected” and in light of the 15th, 19th, and 24th amendments I don’t believe that it’d be a horrible precedent-breaking stretch to say that an unenumerated right enshrined in the constitution is the right to participate in free & fair elections.
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Mine is the 8th; Democratic DC suburbs plus Republican farmland, with a little isthmus connecting them.
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The Ninth Amendment never gets any love.
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