US political war gets some good news

How the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering ruling vindicated the wisdom of John Roberts

…from Washington Post

[ Editor’s Note: I am taking a little break from the war news which has been a grind, as we also have political wars going on at home. I thought this gerrymandering news might be missed by a lot of folks.

The good news is that if Biden can surge going into November and the Repubs destroy their credibility more than they already have, the Democrats have a chance at not taking the beating that political forecasters expect.

I first ran across the State Courts with Democrat majorities saving the day in North Carolina with a big battle over one key seat, which threw the decision up to the Supreme Court for the Dems to win.

People will pay more attention to these State Judge elections now in the future, and judge in general. We had the long string of Trump losses on The Steal. With his simple math skills, he figured that with most state legislatures having Republican majorities, the judges would follow the trend.

But he lost 63 out of 64 cases, not so much on the law, but simply because the evidence the Trump grifter attorneys submitted did not qualify as evidence.

This week we had the Republican head of the Colorado elections and her aide charged for tampering with election equipment and blaming that on Dominion. She’s going down for the count.

Colorado has done two machine recounts, and yes, using the Dominion software, and one hand recount, which had the largest variance, 14 versus half a dozen with the others, at $100K expense.

Trumpers will not care about this, and still claim it was stolen. But as we are seeing now with The Donald, he is looking at criminal charges on The Steal based on his having been provided professional evaluations from his own appointees and even his campaign that there was no widespread fraud… Jim W. Dean ]

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First published March 11, 2022

President Biden’s Supreme Court commission cited Roberts’s ruling as evidence for the view that the court’s conservative majority is “complicit in and partially responsible for the ‘degradation of American democracy’ writ large.”

But as the first redistricting cycle after Rucho v. Common Cause comes to a close, it’s apparent that the critics were mostly wrong about the decision’s effects.

“In 2020 the median district was biased against Joe Biden by two points,” the Economist reported last month. “But in 2022 … this bias is almost certain to be much closer to zero.”

…The fact that state courts are increasingly at the center of a contest over the democratic process is significant, and it could be a model for depolarizing America’s political system.

…State constitutions, for example, “can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in reviewing district lines, Roberts wrote. Now, a handful of state courts have done just that.

…Now, some conservatives, out of frustration with state-court activism, are tempted to compel all states to comply with a nationwide rule of their own. Let’s hope the chief justice finds support on the court for his much-maligned but democratically sound middle way.

You can read the full WaPo article here.

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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