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I just feel like this is another nail in the coffin that is trust in democracy in this country. You look at the stats on how much young people in the USA trust
by bwb 7y ago
I just feel like this is another nail in the coffin that is trust in democracy in this country. You look at the stats on how much young people in the USA trust their political system and it just keeps falling for reasons like this.
Oh please vote... just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side. Oh and ya the electoral college will overwrite the vote of the majority. Democracy?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side Overloaded districts just shift the debate from generals to primaries. I live in Manhattan. It will pretty much always vote blue. That doesn't mean there isn't political competition.
- tptacek 7y ago"Another" nail? If it's a nail, it's one of the first ones in the coffin. Precedent for this decision stretches all the way back to the founders.
- jacobolus 7y agoIn the US context, voting rights were dramatically expanded between the 18th century and the 1960s. A regression to Jim Crow era practices is a serious setback.
- tptacek 7y agoGerrymandering has been a constant since the time of the founders.
- lordCarbonFiber 7y agoThat's wrong, and wrong in really interesting ways.First off if we want to argue from the founders districts were never supposed to be more than 10k people and the number of districts would naturally grow with population. We threw that out the window in the early 20th century precisely to make the representation of power less democratic. Ignoring all of that history, and taking your statement in good faith, it still is reductive to pretend that we're in the same state as the 18th century. Voters are much more diverse, and the technology exists to precisely draw districts to achieve very precise outcomes. The increased precision and ability to do things at scale is a differentiating factor, as well as the increased consequences; a voting population that's just "land owning white males" might see gerrymandering as less extreme that the much more diverse distribution of beliefs we have in the current voting population. The current problems with gerrymandering are huge. Issues that have super majority support among the population (reproductive rights, immigration reform, drug reform, gun control) are controlled by an increasingly small population of voters. You can (and even may be correct) claim that this represents the wills of the founders; it's a much harder sell to claim that this is a "good thing" that the people shouldn't be able to push back against.
- tptacek 7y agoSo by "wrong in interesting ways" you mean "right, but in ways not relevant to my particular argument".
- lordCarbonFiber 7y agoNo, in the you're wrong unequivocally, but the ideas that we can "know the will of the founders" and "the will of the founders somehow matters" is really interesting in 2019.
- tptacek 7y agoI generally don't think we can, but since "gerrymandering" was coined to describe an instance of it occurring in Boston during the presidency of James Madison, I think we have a clear signal in this one case.
- ctlby 7y agoReproductive rights, as understood by liberals, do not have super-majority support [1]. Immigration reform, as understood by liberals, does not have super-majority support [2]. Gun control, as understood by liberals, does not have super-majority support [3]. Marijuana legalization barely has super-majority support [4]. No other drug reform, as understood by liberals, has super-majority support. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx [2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx [3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx [4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx
- avs733 7y agoSo you are arguing that rights and individual freedoms shouldn't be subject to majority approval? I'm confused as to your point...
- 7y ago
- ctlby 7y agoCan you explain in what way this is a "Jim Crow era practice?"
- germinalphrase 7y agoProbably because gerrymandering has been used to reduce the relative impact of black votes on election outcomes.
- GeekyBear 7y agoRacial gerrymandering has long been held to be illegal. Partisan gerrymandering has not.
- threatofrain 7y agoBut do partisan issues exist orthogonally to race? In other words, is government and politics race-blind?
- notacoward 7y agoPrecedent for its opposite also stretches all the way back to the founders. And before, both ways, lest we succumb to the hagiographic portrayal of the founders as supermen who came up with every idea in the constitution totally by themselves. As long as we interpret "political" vs. "legal" as really meaning judicial vs. congressional, this is not a bad argument, but precedent is not the decisive factor. Also, remember that this is the same court in which three justices (Gorsuch/Thomas/Kavanaugh in Kisor and Thomas again in Gamble) have openly called for ignoring stare decisis when it doesn't suit their political objectives. For them to cite precedent and/or judicial humility in any decision at this point is dishonest.
- tptacek 7y agoI don't believe that the framers were supermen, but I also don't know that it's the Supreme Court that's meant to overturn the fundamental decisions the founders made.
- notacoward 7y ago> I also don't know that it's the Supreme Court that's meant to overturn That's exactly the issue I was getting at. Equal representation is clearly a constitutional issue, which it is the court's duty to rule on, and yet the constitution does not explicitly address districting issues. Would defining a standard to determine whether a districting plan meets the constitutional requirement be within the court's purview? Clearly yes, because that kind of standard-setting is a significant part of what they have always done. It's right in the introduction to the Wikipedia list of landmark decisions. "establishing a "test" or a measurable standard that can be applied by courts in future decisions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisions_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisio... Declining to set such a standard because such things are delegated to the states would have been reasonable. Declining to set such a standard because it's a "political" - i.e. legislative - responsibility is also reasonable. But "because the constitution" doesn't work because the constitution is mute on the specifics on which the court was asked to rule. They can't overturn what doesn't exist.
- 7y ago
- GeekyBear 7y agoIndeed. >"Gerrymandering," the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries so as to maximize partisan advantage, is far from new. Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor whose name literally became synonymous with the practice, worked his magic to create a salamander-shaped district over two hundred years ago. https://origins.osu.edu/article/re-mapping-american-politics-redistricting-revolution-fifty-years-later https://origins.osu.edu/article/re-mapping-american-politics...
- notacoward 7y agoThe nail is not gerrymandering itself, but the fact that gerrymandering came before the court and they declined to do anything about it, with the vote following a super-obvious partisan line. That does erode public trust, compared to yesterday when people might still have had hope that the court would advance the cause of equal representation.
- sysbin 7y agoOligarchie is what the young think.
- coldpie 7y ago> I just feel like this is another nail in the coffin that is trust in democracy in this country. You look at the stats on how much young people in the USA trust their political system and it just keeps falling for reasons like this. When you can't vote out your representatives through electoral means, what means remain?
- j_m_b 7y ago>Oh please vote... just remember that we can make your congressional distracts meaningless by overloading it with one side Perhaps candidates should start appealing to more people and winning elections instead of pandering to particular blocks of people.
- moate 7y agoBut that doesn't make sense. If the gerrymander is strong enough, running as a centrist in a heavily partisan district means you lose to the partisan (most of the time). For that singular district the answer might mean color yourself purple, but if done correctly this allows for a party that represents a minority of voters to control things on a state or national level. It's the same problem people have with the electoral collage. You can win a majority of the votes (either by being a partisan or by being a centrist) and lose because maps.
- munificent 7y agoVote either way. Yes, the rules of the game suck and should be changed. As a citizen, there are many ways you can work towards that end. Regardless, the game is still being played and not voting is a move in the game that almost never benefits your own interests. Do you know who got the most votes in the 2016 presidential election? It wasn't Trump. It wasn't Hillary, either. It was no one. The number of people who could have voted outnumbers the votes either candidate got. People who stayed home chose to affect that election more than any other group of people.
- lordCarbonFiber 7y agoIm not a fan of this line of thinking. This ignores the systemic reasons people might not be able to vote. Can you get time off of work, are the poll lines unreasonably long, are the polls close enough to you (you don't necessarily have a car), was your registration purged for reasons unknown (bigger than nonvoters is the population of people eligible to vote, but unregistered), did you just not register because of identification issues or bureaucratic nonsense? Claiming that "people that choose to stay at home" are all independent of the system that effectively disenfranchises them is problematic.
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- basq 7y agoIndeed. As an anecdote, many of my left-leaning friends have become full-blown communists over the last few years. The political situation is likely going to get much much worse before it gets better.