The Supreme Court is about to kick America's democratic death spiral into overdrive
Democrats are running out to time to save the Constitution from itself.
IAN MILLHISER
MAR 19, 2019, 1:50 PM
Somewhere, in an alternative universe where the winner of the 2016 presidential election lives in the White House, partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Justice Merrick Garland provided the key fifth vote in Gill v. Whitford to strike down the Wisconsin Republican Party’s aggressive effort to immunize itself from elections. Lower courts are busy dismantling gerrymanders in states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Maryland. And in 2018, Wisconsin held its first competitive state assembly elections in years.
Meanwhile, here in this universe, the picture is much more grim. In 2018, Democratic Wisconsin state assembly candidates won 54 percent of the two-party popular vote, beating their Republican counterparts by 8 percentage points. Yet Republicans won 63 of the state’s 99 assembly seats.
With Republicans in firm control of the Supreme Court in 2018, the high court decided not to decide Gill, leaving Wisconsin’s gerrymander in place. Then Republicans gained an even tighter grip on the Supreme Court when Justice Anthony Kennedy — the court’s occasional swing vote and the only member of its Republican majority who appeared open to striking down partisan gerrymandering — left the bench.
All of which is a long way of saying that the outcomes in Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, two partisan gerrymandering cases that the Supreme Court will hear next Tuesday, are practically preordained. The Court will almost certainly vote 5-4 to hold that such gerrymanders cannot be dismantled by federal courts. Republicans will keep the profound advantages they gained in 2010, thanks to the coincidence of the fact that the GOP had a strong electoral year immediately before a redistricting cycle. States like Wisconsin will remain sham democracies.
https://thinkprogress.org/supreme-court-partisan-gerrymander-electoral-norms-c83345c150b3/
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Democrats, meanwhile, cannot merely hope to hold onto power until America’s anti-democratic fever breaks. According to a University of Virginia analysis, just under half the country will live in only eight states by 2040 — so half the country will have just 16 senators while the other half has 84. About 70 percent of the country will live in only 16 states.
If Democrats remain popular in population centers while Republicans continue to over-perform in sparsely populated states, in other words, Republicans will soon gain a permanent supermajority in the United States Senate — and with it, permanent control of the Supreme Court and a permanent power to reinterpret the Constitution.
So Democrats have no choice but to confront the Constitution’s anti-democratic pathologies head on. If they allow Senate malapportionment to continue, they will cease to exist as a viable political party.
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough.....................
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