Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan held nothing back in a Thursday dissent criticizing Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion that said federal courts could not rein in partisan gerrymandering.
“In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong,” Kagan, who was joined by the court’s three other liberals, wrote.
She said the conservative majority erred by paying “so little attention to the constitutional harms at their core.”
She went into the details of the two cases in front of the court — challenges to a Democratic-drawn map in Maryland and GOP-drawn map in North Carolina — and how the legislatures were able to draw districts that ensure that their respective received a number seats disproportionate to the state wide vote.
“Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” Kagan said. “I have yet to meet the person who thinks so.”
“Free and fair and periodic elections are the key” to the framers’ vision of democracy, Kagan said.
“And partisan gerrymandering can make [elections] meaningless,” Kagan said. “At its most extreme — as in North Carolina and Maryland — the practice amounts to ‘rigging elections.'”
She noted that majority did not dispute that partisan gerrymandering allows “politicians” to “cherry-pick voters to ensure their reelection.”
She said that one solution the conservative majority offered — that legislatures will curb their own gerrymandering — was “so dubious on its face that I feel secure in delaying my answer for some time. ”
And the other solution the majority offered, she said, was that it “seems to be that if we have lived with partisan gerrymanders so long, we will survive. ”
She countered that technology has allowed for gerrymandering that is “far more effective and durable than before, insulating politicians against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides. ”
“These are not your grandfather’s — let alone the Framers’ — gerrymanders,” she said.
Good for her.
Time to permit PEDs in sports. Cheating is the law of the land.
Roberts is so concerned with his “legacy” that he has joined the liberals on some (very few) decisions. He might as well not bother. His legacy has already been written.
Well, now we have to win big so that we can gerrymander all the districts ourselves. Also, to make Puerto Rico and DC full states.
Conservatives in support of only conservatives in support of only conservatives in support of only conservatives ad infinitum…
Nixon’s elections were fixed.
Reagan’s election was fixed.
W’s election was fixed, and Trump’s election was fixed.
And these conservatives say the government will survive?
Unlimited money, unlimited gerrymandering and unlimited conservative grifting will , and maybe already HAS, killed democracy, or what there was of democracy (no women voters, no poor voters, no African/American voters, no Native American voters) from the beginning.