Decision On Partisan Gerrymandering
27th June 2019
In a decision with far-reaching implications for national politics, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts do not have power to review partisan gerrymandering claims.
The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan led the liberal bloc in dissent.
When district boundaries change to match demographic changes after every decennial census, there are going to be attempts to arrange things so that one side or the other gets an advantage. Aside from having some kind of computer algorithm do it, that’s inevitable.
Some people love the idea of having districts so evenly balanced that a little mood swing one way or the other can tip the election. I don’t, because thees people forget that the more evenly balanced the partisan makeup of a district, the more people are effectively not represented by the final winner of the contest. (Sure, Congresscritters make a lot of noise about ‘representing everybody in the district’, but that’s about as true as most Congressional utterances.)
An ideal district map would be as gerrymandered as possible, with each one being overwhelmingly toward one side or another. Sure, there would be people ‘marginalized’, but that’s always going to happen, and extreme gerrymandering minimizes the number of people who wind up taking it in the shorts. People who have been raised on professional sports teams, and the media who report on them, have been conditioned to want a ‘horse race’ that they can whoop and holler over, and they’ve forgotten the whole point of the system, which is to make people have the best shot of being represented in the legislature by somebody who feels the way they do on issues.