SCOTUS Rulings Disregard Constitutional Amendments
If you thought Citizens United was a cynical decision, you’ll think last week’s gerrymandering ruling is its soulmate.
On the other hand, some people are still shouting “Hurray for the majority!” louder than at a Trump rally.
The 5-4 opinion in the pair of cases, Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, held that gerrymandering is a political question and beyond the power of the Supreme Court. One of the cases involved Democratic skullduggery in Maryland, the other by Republicans in North Carolina.
Last year, SCOTUS ruled on the question of standing to bring a Wisconsin case (Gill v. Whitford), but reserved judgment on the core issue of whether this type of case is a political question until this term.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the five conservatives, “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
Oops! Did he forget about the 1st, 5th and 14th Amendments and the profoundly important “one person, one vote” doctrine or the decisions outlawing racial gerrymandering? Is he saying, “To heck with stare decisis?
Justice Elena Kagan, for the minority, said, “The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”
She added, “These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences.”
Some states have instituted independent or nonpartisan redistricting commissions (e.g., Arizona, Iowa, Montana and California) to draw lines, thus hoping to avoid the problem of legislators as “foxes in the henhouses,” that is, making sure that whatever party controls the lawmaking bodies stay put.
Other states may control unfair partisan districting via state judicial decisions.
The “political question” doctrine used, as in last week’s ruling, is just an excuse for federal courts to avoid hard but doable tasks to make certain that Americans are not conned out of their most basic rights by unscrupulous law makers.
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