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UCmeNdc

(9,589 posts)
Thu Oct 22, 2015, 12:25 PM Oct 2015

The Future Of The Democratic Party Will Be Decided By The Supreme Court

Placing Blame Where It Is Due


As Yglesias notes, many of the Republican Party’s structural advantages in state legislative and U.S. House races stem from gerrymandering — “GOP control of most state legislatures lets Republicans draw boundaries in a way that is even more GOP-friendly than the natural population distribution would suggest.” He also names several policies pushed by Republican state lawmakers that further entrench GOP control. “New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction” help shift the electorate away from the Democratic Party and towards Republicans. Meanwhile, “union-hostile ‘right to work’ laws” starve a backbone of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure of the funding and members it needs to function.

If you don’t like gerrymandering, you should blame the Supreme Court. In the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, four conservative justices said that they would forbid federal courts from hearing challenges to partisan gerrymanders, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion was only slightly less dismissive of these lawsuits. The result is that state lawmakers have been free to draw maps that entrench their party and lock out the other party, even though such maps violate voters’ First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court is also complicit in the wave of “curbs on voting rights” that Yglesias notes in his piece. In a party-line vote, a 5-4 Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, enabling many voter ID laws, gerrymandered maps and other legislation that would have otherwise been blocked to go into effect. Similarly, the Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board effectively greenlighted Voter ID laws — one of the most common examples of state laws that exclude voters likely to support Democrats. The Court’s plurality opinion cited concerns about in-person voter fraud to justify this outcome, even though the opinion could only find one example of such fraud occurring in the United States within the preceding 140 years!


http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/19/3713681/if-democrats-ever-want-to-pass-a-law-again-they-need-to-control-the-supreme-court/
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The Future Of The Democratic Party Will Be Decided By The Supreme Court (Original Post) UCmeNdc Oct 2015 OP
RIP U.S. democracy. moondust Oct 2015 #1

moondust

(19,917 posts)
1. RIP U.S. democracy.
Thu Oct 22, 2015, 01:06 PM
Oct 2015

Hey, at least they're not slaughtering the natives in their campaigns to possess and reign over the land and everything on it. That's sooooo 17th century.

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