4508

stay tuned

4509

The Census question looks to be a shitshow.

Basically, the ruling SCOTUS is considering is a challenge to the citizenship question based on the Administration law, i.e. that the executive can’t make and act on thoughtless, capricious decisions. The plaintiffs wanted to allege an equal protection claim — that the motivation for adding the question was an attempt to suppress votes and limit congressional representation along racial lines — but they were prevented from doing that because they were prevented from deposing Ross. Without his testimony they couldn’t show evidence of intent. So the SCOTUS case was argued only on the Administration law challenge, and is supposed to be decided on that basis.

Now, of course, there is actual evidence on the record of racist intent. The evidence is strong enough that the Appellate court has sent the original case back to the trial judge with instructions that the court reconsider the merits of an Equal Protection challenge.

The Administration is trying to forestall that reconsideration, by asking SCOTUS to pre-rule on the Equal Protection challenge now; this, despite the fact that the original court has not made any findings of fact at all, and no arguments on the law have even been made to SCOTUS.

4510

Alito, Ginsberg and Roberts are left to write the opinions for the remaining 5 cases

4511

I think the point is that it’s much better to have a justice with an ideological opposition to government rather than a justice with a partisan allegiance to the GOP, especially given the rise of the fascist wing of that party.

Obviously it should have been Merrick Garland, and he would have been much better, but we can’t have nice things.

4512

Perhaps on the margins. Is Goresuch so opposed to government power, and so not-aligned with partisan interests, that he’ll form a majority against actual partisan efforts to control government? E.g. gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc? That remains to be seen, but I kind of doubt it. In which case, he’s helping the fascist wing of the party.

4513

You know what needs to happen… Folks need to start floating the idea that if Trump were to nominate Garland to the SCOTUS, that it’d be hugely popular with moderates and democrats, and errode support for his impeachment.

Sell it as a way for him to personally glorify himself.

I could see him doing that.

4514

I don’t think it’s a “wing,” per se. It’s the whole enchilada.

4515

That is not an entirely crazy idea. Trump has no ideological underpinning and doesn’t really care who goes on the court. On the other hand, McConnell wouldn’t bring it up for a vote.

4516

Some more info on the case with Gorsuch breaking with the more conservative justices:

The case centers on a man named Andre Haymond, who had served a prison sentence for possessing child pornography and was out on supervised release. When additional images of child pornography were discovered on his electronic devices, the federal judge in his case sentenced him back to prison for a mandatory minimum of five years. As the Court explained today in its ruling, under the federal law at issue, “if a judge finds by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant on supervised release committed one of several enumerated offenses, including the possession of child pornography, the judge must impose an additional prison term of at least five years and up to life without regard to the length of the prison term authorized for the defendant’s initial crime of conviction.”

Haymond challenged the judge’s sentencing on the grounds that it violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, with Justice Stephen Breyer concurring in the judgment, voted today in favor of Haymond.

“The Constitution seeks to safeguard the people’s control over the business of judicial punishments by ensuring that any accusation triggering a new and additional punishment is proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt,” Gorsuch wrote. “By contrast, the view the government and dissent espouse would demote the jury from its historic role as ‘circuitbreaker in the State’s machinery of justice’ to 'low-level gatekeeping.” Gorsuch made it clear that he would have no part of that.

As for the dissenters, they accused Gorsuch of seeking to obliterate a key part of the modern criminal justice system in the name of protecting the rights of criminal defendants. According to the dissent of Justice Alito, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, “the intimation” of Gorsuch’s view is that “all supervised-release revocation proceedings must be conducted in compliance with the Sixth Amendment—which means that the defendant is entitled to a jury trial, which means that as a practical matter supervised-release revocation proceedings cannot be held.”

I think that Gorsuch’s position is correct, in that if you serve your time but are then put on supervised release, a violation of that release that sends you back to prison SHOULD require a trial by jury, to prove that you actually did it.

Otherwise, you are effectively just sending someone to jail for a new crime, without giving them the trial that they are entitled to under the 6th amendment.

This could have fairly far reaching repercussions, most of them good in my mind (even if the guy in this particular case was likely a piece of shit).

4517

I think everyone involved in this sub-conversation agrees that the fascist wing is in complete control of the GOP at this point. Even those of us who disagree on almost everything else :)

4518

Evidently partisan gerrymandering is A-OK with the Federal Courts. Does that mean the State courts are the finally arbiter now?

4519

Yes.
FYI, this is being discussed in the gerrymander thread too.

4520

I think this is what it means. It’s not so much that the Federal court says it’s ok… it’s that they don’t think there’s anything explicitly unconstitutional about it that merits them overruling the power of the states.

4521

So essentially if one party is in power and they gerrymander the redistricting, they can effectively perpetuate their control.

Roberts mumbled something about voters being the remedy, etc., but as we’ve seen in a representational democracy the minority vote getter (Trump 2016) can still win.

4522

Eh, no, not really.

Gerrymandering usually tends to be based upon walking a fairly fine line to screw over the other party, but it’s based upon normal turnout levels. Basically, boxing your opponents into districts where they comprise a good number of votes, but not enough to win. And then you do this in as many districts as possible. (there are cases where they just stuff all of a group into a single district too, but this is less common)

In these cases, the gerrymandering can be overcome with turnout, because the balance is based on the normal, appallingly low turnout numbers of American voters. if you boost your turnout, it breaks the gerrymander, and it can actually backfire on those who set it up, because they’ve explicitly set you up to have ALMOST enough to win in a ton of districts, so with elevated turnout, you actually do win all those districts.

So, you can beat it with turnout… unfair that you should have to, but it’s what you’re left with because the Democrats didn’t care enough about state elections in years gone by.

Also, in some states (like PA), you have other options, in cases where your state constitution makes a state prohibition of gerrymandering. So that’s another possibility, and the SCOTUS ruling (along with prior ones for states like Florida) basically says that the Federal courts can’t interfere with those state level decisions that prevent gerrymandering.

4523

You’re not wrong, but look at the margins in the last off year VA election. Democrats clobbered Republicans (what was the margin, like 10 points almost) and still despite that it came to a coin flip to determine control for the VA House. I mean, it is along with much of our political structure fundamentally undemocratic.

4524

This is true, and the recent 2018 midterms showed that “efficiently” gerrymandered districts can be overcome by turnout. However, gerrymandering software is robust enough to “over-engineer” the gerrymander, giving up a slight amount of numerical advantage in the results to increase the probability of the results. For example, a lot of models were shooting for 55% support for one party in a district to produce a result for that party, but the 2018 turnout overcame that in some areas. It would be easy enough to gerrymander using a somewhat higher number (like 60% support for one party) to make it much more difficult for turnout to overcome.

Nothing is insurmountable but the reality is, the current USSC ruling allows massive room for exploitation, manipulation, abuse of political political and what I consider anti-democratic cheating.

4525

Didn’t that whoopin’ result in the coin flip tho. D’s came back from waaaay down. (+15 seats)

4526

We’ll see if SCOTUS delivers a one-two punch to democracy with their ruling on the census issue. Nothing works better than gerrymandering combined with vote suppression. The GOP has a gameplan.

4527

It’s not supposed to matter how far down you were before. If you get a huge edge in votes, that should translate to a huge edge in seats. To take an extreme example, if a new poltical party stormed on to the scene and somehow got 60% of the votes, but only 30% of the seats,it wouldn’t be correct to say “well, their vote advatange did let them gain a lot of seats”