The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    One Supreme Court seat turns it all around.

    By jollyroger on Mon, 03/03/2014 - 2:53am |

    Assume, arguendo, that the Dems hold the Senate in 2014.

     

    As now, the House remains, by virtue of crass gerrymander, out of reach of democratic pressure, with no visible hope of redress until the 2020 redistricting, if then.

     

    Must we accept, then, utter and complete stagnation until the congress elected in November 2020 is organized in January 2021?  That is seven more lost years.

     

    Perhaps there is another scenario.

     

    It cannot be lost upon any fair minded observer that the guarantee to each state of "a republican form of government" (Article IV, section 4) is reduced to a mockery when games are played to draw legislative districts designed to favor one party over the other.

     

    Yet, despite the peg of a constitutional mandate upon which to hang an attack on the gerrymander, the Federal Courts have been loath to apply any serious scrutiny to the  practice.

     

    So loath, in fact, that of the two significant decisions touching upon the unfairness which results when the votes of one citizen count for more or less than the votes of another, one is couched in extremely narrow terms, and the other is explicitly declared to be useless as precedent.  In short, the courts have refused to consider the question of equal protection as a standard for the constitutional evaluation of state voting and districting practices.

     

    I refer in the first case to Baker v. Carr (one person, one vote) and in the latter to Bush v. Gore.

     

    I offer for consideration the following scenario.

     

    If one of the current five Republican justices could be replaced by an Obama appointment, a case could be brought and won using as precedents the two cases cited above (notwithstanding the limiting language in Bush v. Gore) ,arguing the mandate of equally protecting the votes of urban and rural individuals, so as to force a wholesale redistricting of the House of Representatives which would vindicate the popular majority of 1.5 million that Democratic candidates received over Republicans in the most recent election. 

     

    Moreover, the myriad games that are currently permitted vis-a-vis the times of operation and location of polling places, the requirements for registration, and the standards for purging voting roles would fall before the nationalization of all elections and the imposition of uniform standards throughout the country.

     

     

    Comments

    We can hope.  

    Who is in the pool of likely candidates? 

     Obama's Federal Judiciary Failures | The Nation

    " Second, he has neglected to think and act strategically with respect to those he has nominated. The lack of strategic thinking is reflected in the philosophy and relative age of Obama’s judges. Where the Republicans made sure to appoint solidly conservative judges who would serve for many decades, Obama has focused on finding nonideological or middle-of-the-road candidates.


    by Resistance on Mon, 03/03/2014 - 6:29am

    Truth to tell, it's a long shot...The courts have studiously shied away from confronting the obvious equal protection transgressions that attach to the insane checkerboard county by county voting system, let alone the authority we habitually give to partisan state officials, and the self-serving legislatures who draw insane district boundaries for utterly (and transparently) venal reasons.

     

    All this, they subsume under the arcane heading "political questions" which means "we ain't picking up this hot potato for anything!"

     

    That said, there are judges who would go the other way.  Assuming the left four (Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor) would support the wholesale overhaul envisioned here, there are plenty of candidates for the fifth (assuming a vacancy might arise, failing the fantasy cardiovascular misadventure that I once envisioned for Scalia)

    In fact, I still look for David Cole to sit on the court someday..His father, Bob Cole and I were once partners of a sort...we were both fucking the same girl when I was in law school and he was our Con Law Prof. David looks today just like he did back then.

     

    Edit to add: The Nation article about sums it up, except it predates the semi-nuclear option that should have cleared the way for district and circuit court judges of liberal bent.

     

    Except that the sniveling phony still doesn't pick such judges, and in the recent heartbreak surrounding 6 Georgia slots he has held to a deal originally struck during the pre filibuster reform days, seeming to indicate that "bold" and "Obama" will never be mentioned in the same sentence...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/03/2014 - 8:00am

    I am seriously full of shit.  

     

    As I re-read this, it is perfectly obvious that the PTB like things just the way they are...it is easier to vote for the American Idol than the American President, and that's no accident.

     

    Since the loser in an election (most times) doesn't care enough to sue over the insane voting system, it would have to be one of us poor schmucks who are getting screwed by the brain-dead voters in other states.

     

    Don't know if we have standing to complain.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 11:20am

    Is it allowable to make personal attacks against yourself? How about If I quote you in the future? wink

    BTW  Thanks for sticking up for me.

    Tell me Jolly, Why do we even have the electoral college in this modern day. When the popular vote is so readily available?  Is it a bulwark for PTB? While they flood the streets with PCP?


    by Resistance on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 12:46pm

    I had not actually included the electoral college in the catalog of horrors, because it is somewhat more outcome neutral than the shenanigans played with pol accessibility and gerrymandering, but to answer the question (and looking for as much utility as might be found) it operates to magnify the margin of victory and thus quell post election dissension.

     

    The easiest analysis of this is to imagine an election where the popular majority was fifty votes in favor of the victor, spread so that in each of the 50 states the margin was one.  This would produce an electoral college victory of 535 to 0.

     

    As to whether that is a good or bad thing, fuck if I know...


    by jollyroger on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 1:07pm

    Of course, the same arithmetic cuts two ways...Dean ERWIN CHEMERINSKY, UC Irvine Law School, sounds the alarm and calls for Ginsburg (and perhaps Breyer) both to resign at the end of this term so that Obama would be assured the replacement nomination (and confirmation) before electoral catastrophe intervenes...a variation on the emergency resignation I envisioned when it looked like Romney would win in 2012.


    by jollyroger on Wed, 03/19/2014 - 3:56am