Republican partisan redistricting gets an assist from the justices

Having already wrongly allowed the unlimited use of raw partisan factors in redistricting, the United States Supreme Court now appears poised to prohibit the use of racial factors in map drawing.

Even if the court wants state legislators to be strictly neutral on matters of race, this will lead to even greater political manipulation of the cards and, egged on by President Trump, the Republican Party will continue to distort the cards to its advantage at the expense of voters’ desires.

Fair maps, like we have in New York, are best for democracy, but the Republican Party doesn’t want fair maps.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving Louisiana’s effort to repeal the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that ensures racial minorities receive representation in Congress. Although it retained this same article in mid-2023, the Court’s conservative majority seemed willing to strike it down; after all, he has largely stopped caring about precedent or decency.

We won’t say that the high court plans to gut the law, one of the key legacies of the mid-century civil rights movement, if only because it has already done so. This amounts to finishing the job, hacking away at one of the last remaining pieces of this landmark legislation. The Court has allowed explicitly partisan gerrymandering in the past, such as using tortured reasoning to approve blatantly undemocratic efforts.

Much of this litigation relies on the argument that racism and discriminatory election results are in fact a problem that has been solved, which ignores the fact that much of the progress made is precisely due to restrictions like the Voting Rights Act.

With a series of such favorable court rulings and others potentially on the way, Trump’s MAGA Republicans have increasingly abandoned even the pretense that they are not reversing the polarity of the American electoral system, with representatives choosing their electors rather than the other way around.

Trump, who has a habit of speaking out and saying explicitly what the rest of the party was trying to do surreptitiously, openly demanded that the Texas legislature gain five additional congressional seats through brutal redistricting, and that state conscientiously respected. In doing so, these lawmakers have chosen to disenfranchise their own voters and move further away from our nation’s legacy as a long-standing beacon of democracy, nothing more, nothing less.

Today, North Carolina, a state with a 10-4 Republican majority in Congress although it is virtually evenly divided in terms of voters’ partisan preference, is seeking to get in on the action and redistrict to pick up yet another safe GOP seat just for good measure.

These efforts are not just about the individual members who will make up the next Congress, but also about what Congress itself is capable of doing to safeguard its authority as a co-equal branch of government. So far, the House Republican majority led by Trump spokesman Mike Johnson has been entirely content to let the president siphon off his constitutional and statutory powers — by seizing funds that Congress had already appropriated, instituting tariffs that only Congress should have the authority to enact, taking military action without even informing Congress of its legal justification, and so on.

In an immediate sense, these redistricting efforts aim to keep things that way: a sterilized Congress that sits idly by while Trump strips it of all its authority and concentrates power on himself. Whatever your particular political leanings, this is exactly the kind of thing our three-branch government, framed by Founders who had just waged war against the tyranny of a king, is supposed to prevent.

MAGA lawmakers are already salivating at the idea of ​​dividing neighborhoods, towns, and cities across the country to consolidate their power. If he has any integrity left, the High Court will say no.