The California Supreme Court will not prevent Democrats from moving forward Thursday with a plan to redraw congressional districts.
Republicans in the Golden State had asked the state’s high court to step in and temporarily block the redistricting efforts, arguing that Democrats — who are racing to put the plan on the ballot later this year — had skirted a rule requiring state lawmakers to wait at least 30 days before passing newly introduced legislation.
But in a ruling late Wednesday, the court declined to act, writing that the Republican state lawmakers who filed the suit had “failed to meet their burden of establishing a basis for relief at this time.”
This is sad that america is being shown how little voting matters when district manipulation occurs. If both dems and repubs do it equally then it might be a wash but it sure exposes a shaky, questionable system.
Oh it won’t be a wash. Republican gerrymandering is basically all in place. gerrymandering becomes less effective/ more risky the more extreme you do it, to when you take it to it’s extreme or go past it, it backfires.
Blue states have largely kept their powder dry is what’s really going on. So there was little benefit and much to lose with Trump picking this fight.
When you combine gerrymandering with targeted disenfranchisement, it works great. Dems haven’t been “keeping their powder dry”, they’ve just been lazy and apathetic in the face of a conservative power grab.
In Texas, we’re going to see Abbot crack down hard on liberal leaning corners of Republican staked races. Mass disenfranchisement of students - particularly those in the poorer dorms - plus crackdowns on voting on minority-majority campuses (Texas Southern University in Houston, for instance) go a long way towards strangling Dem turnout. Crackdowns on mail-in voting in liberal leaning elderly suburbs can depress turnout. Deliberate meddling with the certification process for voting machines, harassment of poll workers, and constraints on early voting in big liberal districts can bloat the wait times to vote and discourage participation among liberal voters.
I fully expect to see ICE agents all over polling locations, with a particular eye for anyone who looks illegally colored or otherwise ethnic, in the 2025 municipal cycle
Single representative geographically constrained districts are already a bad system. The fact that these districts have swollen from 15-20k (at the nation’s founding) to 600k+ (in the modern day) have only escalated the degree to which politicians (and their donors) get to pick their voters.
If you want to talk about fixing our broken political system, we need to consider uncapping the total number of House Reps (an artificial limit imposed back in the 1920s to benefit incumbents) and shrink district sizes and afford voters the freedom to select representatives outside the constraint of voting districts.
Bemoaning the gamesmanship over district shapes, at this stage, is just arguing over how you want the game to be rigged. But the idea that districts which are more swing-y are somehow “more fair” than ones that are entrenched by a particular party ignores the dynamics that swing a district to begin with (money, media access, internal party politics). People outside the party duopoly are still wholly unrepresented. People on the losing end of an election are also unrepresented. And people who can’t access their elected representative (because they can’t afford a $2000/plate fund raising lunch) are also unrepresented.
Dems control districting of fewer seats than reps. That’s just a path to permanent minority rule by the reps.