Category Archives: voting

Lawlessness Back in the Courts

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Last fall, California voters passed Proposition 50, which authorized the California legislature, in a one-time good deal, to bypass the State’s voter referendum-mandated independent commission that was created for the purpose of drawing Congressional district boundaries in as politically neutral fashion as could be. Proposition 50 was passed though, based explicitly on this premise:

…the move was a political necessity: California, [supporters] said, could not unilaterally adhere to neutral redistricting standards while Republican-controlled states entrenched their own power through aggressive gerrymandering.

Prop 50 is now likely headed to the Supreme Court after the case wends its way through lower courts. Its opponents are centering their argument on the premise that the redrawn map relies too heavily on racial gerrymandering, which the Court has virtually outlawed with its Louisiana v Callais ruling.

There’s another reason, though, that the Court should overrule Prop 50, albeit it would be a more difficult case to make. That reason flows from the backers’ basic premise. The law creating the commission—at those voters’ demand and approval—says what it says, and there is no place in the text for setting aside neutrality whenever one or another political party does something the State’s legislature or governor doesn’t like.

The State should be held to what the law says, not what politicians want it to say. What makes this argument difficult to make in the Court, though, is that voters are allowed to change their minds, and this may be what California’s voters did last fall. The question would hinge on the underlying premise’s intrinsic disregard for then-extant law.

The racial gerrymandering beef itself will be hard enough to prove with the Court in Callais having also said that actual racial animus must be shown; relying on a racial component that’s merely a statistical byproduct of a move wouldn’t fly.

Racism of the NAACP

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Against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, in which the Court virtually barred racial gerrymandering, and Tennessee’s subsequent realigning its Congressional district boundaries to eliminate just that racism in its districts, the NAACP has sued the State for having done so.

The core of the NAACP’s suit is that the redraw didn’t preserve the racially done district.

This is the intrinsic racism of the NAACP: it demands special treatment of black voters (which can come only at the direct expense of all of Tennessee’s non-black voters) with the provision of a special Congressional district into which they can be segregated.

The NAACP with this suit also has demonstrated its utter contempt for the same black citizens it claims to protect, insisting as its suit tacitly does, that blacks are inherently inferior and cannot compete effectively with other groups of American citizens without that special protection.  Woodrow Wilson, in a bygone era, insisted that black Americans should be grateful for the protections of segregation. This is today’s NAACP.

Disingenuous Appeal

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The Virginia Attorney General, Progressive-Democrat Jay Jones, has appealed to the US Supreme Court his State’s Supreme Court ruling that the redistricting map that cut Virginia citizens’ Federal House of Representatives representation from six districts favoring Progressive-Democrats and five Republican-favoring districts to a split of ten Progressive-Democrat-favoring districts and one Republican-favoring. His rationalization is that the State Court’s ruling

deprived voters, candidates, and the commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts[.]

This is a cynical misreading of the State Supreme Court ruling, and it’s Jones’ attempt to deprive voters, candidates, and the commonwealth of their right to elect the candidates of their choice, from a correct list of candidates campaigning in legitimate districts.

The State’s Supreme Court pointed out in so many words what the disenfranchisement caused by the struck map was:

The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, 2025. By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.

Jay and his fellow Progressive-Democrats are attempting to disenfranchise those 40% of the voters who had no chance to consider the redistricting map before they voted.

Here are Progressive-Democrats refusing to accept their own Court’s decision, a decision the US Supreme Court should uphold by refusing to accept the appeal. That refusal, if it comes and were it also to be explained, should stem from two factors. One is that the State’s Supreme Court Justices know the State’s Constitution better than the US Supreme Court Justices and so the latter should defer to the former on this matter. The other is that, as the State’s Court ruling emphasized, the deprivation was by the State’s legislature through its disregard of their own constitution.

Mindset

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The problem is laid out early in the Wall Street Journal article:

Republicans are playing defense in Ohio and a growing number of other red states….

No. Republicans should not be playing defense anywhere, but especially not in the so-called battleground constituencies. That’s a purely reactive mindset and behavior, and it meekly surrenders the initiative to the Progressive-Democrats.

Republican candidates should be out among their constituents and among heretofore Progressive-Democrat Party constituencies and among areas where voters are typically undecided or are uncommitted to one party or the other. They should be talking about their own policies in concrete, measurable terms, and they should be talking similarly about their particular Progressive-Democrat opponent’s policies, where that one has any, and about the utter lack of policy beyond Never Trump ideology where that Progressive-Democrat candidate has nothing else on offer. In talking about those two sets of policies or about policy vs Never Trump, Republicans should be emphasizing both those differences and the failures of those Progressive-Democrat positions.

In particular, Ohio Republican Senate candidate Jon Husted should be talking about his specific policy successes and comparing those to what Progressive-Democrat candidate Sherrod Brown has on offer—a prior three-term record of progressive taxing and spending with nothing accomplished for the benefit of Ohio’s workers, steelworkers included. Just money taken out of Ohio citizens’ pockets and wasted.

But that’s not enough by itself. Mid-term elections are characterized by Progressive-Democratic Party voters coming out in droves while Republican voters sit on their couches in the supposed comfort of their homes. Republican candidates need to be encouraging those voters to get out and vote. They can best do this by explicitly and repeatedly urging them to go vote and by showing how their own policies best support the needs and wants of those voters.

There’s more required, though. Those Republican voters need actually to bestir themselves to vote. They shouldn’t be waiting to be told; they should be acting on their own initiative. Republican voters need to understand that every decision to not bother to vote is an active decision to favor the Progressive-Democrat candidate with their non-vote.

In the end, Republicans need to be forcing Progressive-Democrat candidates to react to their initiatives, always and everywhere. If they don’t, they’ll lose this election in both houses of Congress, the Presidential election in ’28, and for elections to come for generations.

Gerrymandering

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The subheadline laid it out.

Rep. Steve Cohen’s long career is evidence that the motive is partisan.

Which is a big so what. Partisan gerrymandering perhaps ought to be as illegal as racial gerrymandering, but it isn’t.

The editors partially addressed the so what at the end of their piece:

The Tennessee gerrymander is simply a GOP effort to divide a compact, populated area into multiple stringy districts for partisan gain, which is precisely what Democrats did in Virginia. It’s bad for competitive elections, but it isn’t racist.

The rest of this story is that there’s no “ought to be” IMNSHO regarding the legality of partisan gerrymandering. It’s a violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection of the laws. Competitive elections can occur only when that gerrymandering loophole is closed also.