Supreme Court Takes up New Partisan Gerrymandering Challenge

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it would, once again, consider whether partisan gerrymandering can be so extreme that it violates the Constitution.

The move comes after a term in which the justices had looked poised to impose some limits on partisan influence in redistricting, but ultimately appeared unable to agree on a clear standard for evaluating when state lawmakers cross the line from unseemly to unlawful.

The Supreme Court has invalidated racial gerrymanders in the past, but it has never struck down districts for being too partisan. The gerrymandering cases from last June—one from Maryland, the other from Wisconsin—were two of the term’s most anticipated decisions because they raised the possibility that the Court would do so for the first time.

They could maximize their future jurisprudential freedom by simply finding that that no workable standard has been discovered. That would leave us where we’ve always been. But the Court could go further, and conclude that gerrymandering cases present a nonjusticiable political question, as Justices Rehnquist, O’Connor, Scalia and Thomas held in Vieth 14 years ago. If the justices were to so decide, partisan gerrymandering claims would be all but locked out of federal court.

Finally, if the Court is inclined to once again sidestep the question, it could probably find a way to rule that, because the current maps have to be redrawn in 2020 anyway, these cases are likely to become moot and should not be decided.

And then we’d get the pleasure of going through all this again in 2021 and 2022.

Cut and paste from the other day... and here, too.

Before addressing gerrymandering, I'd like to see a debate on raising the size limit of the House. More districts will force states to change the size and shape of existing districts.

The current limit of 435 Representatives was set by The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 based on the census of 1910 when the population was 92,228,496. The result of the 2010 census was 308,745,538, a 235% increase in the last 100 years. Maybe it's time to increase the size of the House? This would rebalance the party split in Congress, as well as increase the Electoral College to influence presidential elections.

What if, on average, each state received two more Congressional districts? What about four more? How would they determine those districts? This opens up the gerrymandering debate currently heading to SCOTUS. Do states have enough wiggle room to hide these new districts in snake-like geographies that boggle the mind, or would this force some calls for "fairness" in the setting of Congressional districts going forward?

If we increase the size of the House to reflect the current population, the Electoral College will grow proportionally and we won't see such dramatic splits between the popular vote and EC vote, because these "unrepresented" popular votes will now be accounted for in the Electoral College.

Or 10X the number of representatives, and the Constituents:Representatives ratio is down to 70,000:1. Problem solved. The number stopped by a majority vote at 435 in about 1930. Ask yourself why. It can be changed just as easily if our critters had any decency about them. Oh, never mind.

Wouldn't 100+ more Representatives be a threat to the current incumbent power structure? How would current leadership wield power over 50 or more "country bumpkins" from flyover country who suddenly showed up with the mandate from their districts? Can their be a critical mass beyond which the current leadership can no longer threaten their caucus into acquiescence? Naturally, a new order would emerge; would this be multi-party or would it be a rise of the "normals?" At some tipping point, the "elite" class would be overwhelmed by numbers by the rest of us.

-PJ

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