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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Conservatives Who Gutted the Voting Rights Act Are Now Challenging ‘One Person, One Vote’
Ari Berman on May 28, 2015 - 3:06 PM ET
Ed Blum, who brought the case that led to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, is now going after the historic principle of "one person, one vote." The Supreme Court decided on Tuesday to hear Evenwel v. Abbott, Blum's latest case, which challenges the drawing of State Senate districts in Texas. The obscure case could have major ramifications for political representation.
Blum first began attacking the Voting Rights Act after losing a Houston Congressional race to a black Democrat in 1992 and founded the Project on Fair Representation in 2005 to challenge the constitutionality of the VRA. The Evenwel case doesn't deal directly with the VRA, but on how districts should be calculated. Since the Supreme Court's 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decision, districts have been drawn based on the total population of an area. Blum instead wants lines to be drawn based only on eligible votersexcluding children, inmates, non-citizens, etc from counting toward representation.
If that happened, legislative districts would become older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative rather than younger, more diverse, more urban, and more liberal. "It would be a power shift almost perfectly calibrated to benefit the Republican party," explains University of Texas law professor Joey Fishkin. "The losers would be urban areas with lots of children and lots of racially diverse immigrants. The winners would be older, whiter, more suburban, and rural areas. It would be a power shift on a scale American redistricting law has not seen since the 1960s. While not nearly as dramatic as the original reapportionment revolution, it would require every map in every state to be redrawn, with the same general pattern of winners and losers."
Demographically, the gap between Republicans and Democrats is wider than it has ever been. "House Republicans are still 87 percent white male, compared to 43 percent of House Democrats - the widest gap we've ever seen," explains Dave Wasserman, House editor of The Cook Political Report. "In terms of composition of districts, the median GOP district is 76% white, while the median Dem district is 49% whiteagain, the widest gap we've ever seen. Overall, the median House district is 68% white, compared to 63% for the nation as a whole."
http://www.thenation.com/blog/208625/conservatives-who-gutted-voting-rights-act-are-now-challenging-one-person-one-vote
world wide wally
(21,754 posts)and it seems to be what the people want because they keep having chances to do something about it and keep voting republican.
These are no American values I ever learned.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)but not the whole country -- not yet, anyway.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)complete contempt for Democracy. As Republicans took over NC in 2010 due to low voter turnout, they gerrymandered the hell out it, got rid of early voting and passed a voter ID law. Our Gov is currently being sued for purging thousands of minority voters off the rolls. Seeing as how our Senate race was extremely close , those voters might have sent another Dem to the Senate. They keep winning through voter suppression and cheating.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)Need to keep this kicked up!
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)The premise of a tax planned by the Marin Sonoma Mosquito and Vector Control District is that property benefiting the most from vermin services should be billed accordingly. Property owners may cast a vote for each parcel they own....
Asked to describe how taxes owed by disparate properties was determined, district publicist, Nizza Sequeira emailed this explanation: "The method used for apportioning the assessment is based upon the proportional special benefits to be derived by the properties in the assessment area over and above general benefits conferred on real property or to the public at large...The first step is to identify the types of special benefit arising from the improvements or services, the second step is to estimate the general and special benefits, and the third step is to allocate the assessment to property based on the estimated relative special benefit for each type of property."
In short, the procedure used by consulting engineers to calculate who owes what was a complicated best guess. "Each property was assigned an estimated level of special benefit relative to a single family home," the explanation continued. "After the level of benefit for each property was estimated, the total cost of the mosquito control services and other improvements to be funded by the proposed assessment was allocated to each property based on the estimated special benefit received." Those interested in details may consult the district's website at www.msmosquito.com
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)sulphurdunn
(6,891 posts)in the morning to even try and get my head around that. Maybe that was the idea. So much for "keep it simple".
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)for school taxes? Illiterates for library taxes?
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)On the other hand, "one kid, one vote" might mean a lot more school taxes and bond issues would pass.
herding cats
(19,567 posts)If the SC were to rule the new measure is to be the number of people rather than registered voters, California's districts will change dramatically. Power will shift to the more conservative regions of the state in many cases.
This has potential, if allowed, to help shore up state power for the Republicans for decades.
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)This is frightening and infuriating. And with this SC, it will probably go through.
herding cats
(19,567 posts)There's a reason they decided to hear this case when all the others weren't heard. We need to be very worried about this, it has longstanding and far reaching implications on all of us.
Quackers
(2,256 posts)We just need to skip all of this crap and go for whomever wins the popular vote wins the election. That's what I would love to see.
valerief
(53,235 posts)valerief
(53,235 posts)"Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today."
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)Colombian families whose relatives were massacred by paramilitaries cannot sue the Chiquita Brands fruit company in federal court, the 11th Circuit United States Court of Appeals ruled last week. The victims charged that Chiquita was responsible for the deaths by funding a right-wing paramilitary group.
The perpetrators, in this case, are the United Auto-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary umbrella group responsible for the most heinous human rights atrocities committed over the course of Colombias 50-year armed conflict.
By its own account, Chiquita made at least 100 payments $1.7 million in total to the AUC between 1997 and 2004. In the decade prior to that, the company had maintained a similar arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nominally leftist rebel group chased out of the region by the combined (and coordinated) efforts of the AUC and Colombian military.
During that period, Colombias banana-growing region became the key battleground in the armed conflict, which had already degenerated into by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere, in the words of then-UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland. Civilian populations throughout the Uraba region and journalists, labor organizers, human rights advocates, community leaders, and left-leaning politicians, in particular were targeted as part of a crude but effective paramilitary total war.
Between 1997 and 2004, 3,778 people were murdered in Uraba, with an additional 60,000 forced into what is now the second-largest internally displaced population in the world. Between 1991 and 2006, 668 unionists were killed from the main banana-workers union alone, according to the National Union School.
If the testimony of several former high-level paramilitaries can be believed, Chiquita played an integral role in the formation of Urabas so-called Quintuple Alliance, a sprawling conspiracy made up of politicians and public servants, large landowners and business interests, military officials, paramilitaries, and narcotraffickers. This would at least partly explain why, in 2001, some 3,400 AK-47 assault rifles sent to the AUC from Nicaraguan trafficking partners were unloaded by a Chiquita subsidiary on a Chiquita dock, the same dock where a company official had recently paid $30,000 in bribe money to Colombian customs officials.
Gormy Cuss
(30,884 posts)awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)Death by a thousand cuts
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)LastLiberal in PalmSprings
(12,592 posts)When the Constitution took effect in 1789, it did not "secure the blessings of liberty" to all people. The expansion of rights and liberties has been achieved over time, as people once excluded from the protections of the Constitution asserted their rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence. These Americans have fostered movements resulting in laws, Supreme Court decisions, and constitutional amendments that have narrowed the gap between the ideal and the reality of American freedom.
At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, only 6 percent of the populationwhite, male property ownerswas eligible to vote.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_of_freedom_13.html
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Does this sound like the direction the GOP is heading?
bigtree
(86,005 posts)SCantiGOP
(13,873 posts)If you really want to refer back to the Founding Fathers' original intent, the argument over how to count slaves was one of the major problems in getting the Southern and Northern states to agree on the Constitution. They enshrined the fact that non-voters (indeed, slaves were non-citizens) were to be counted.
Tell this asshole in Texas that he has a way to accomplish his goal - it involves amending the US Constitution, and nothing short of that will work (I hope!).
Ilsa
(61,698 posts)Day but couldn't post. Thanks.
Avalux
(35,015 posts)They aren't going to stop on their own. The rest of us have to figure out ways to stop them.
LarryNM
(493 posts)sulphurdunn
(6,891 posts)become law, it will immediately become necessary to pass further draconian laws making registering to vote a very complex and legally risky proposition.
AgingAmerican
(12,958 posts)They must erode civil rights to keep that grip on power.
DocMac
(1,628 posts)I'm not even sure they sleep.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)Response to octoberlib (Original post)
AZ Progressive This message was self-deleted by its author.
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)Constitutionally, this is a tough call. Generally, we consider representative government to represent "the people" and this means all the people, not just property owning males, as it did at one time. When you start saying certain categories of people are not entitled to representation, you run afoul of the constitution. Blum might get away with not counting illegal aliens, but I think that's about as far as he'll get. Even citizens of other countries are entitled to be represented, as long as they're here legally, pay taxes, send their kids to public school, etc. Of course, we have a couple Supreme Court justices who feel democracy is reserved for the few, so they would happily rule to exclude as many people as they could.
cascadiance
(19,537 posts)If 10 years, then 10 years from now, this methodology would have the districts so out of whack representing even those considered "voters" then, as so many voters counted in the previous counts would have died off, and so many newer voters in different locations would be a part of the system.
The current system, by counting everyone, does a far better job of trying to assess not only today's registered voters, but how the demographics will break down 10 years later when redistricting is done again.
Also, this would be an incentive for the PTB to increase the size of guest worker programs like H-1B and H-2B displacing American workers here, as they wouldn't be counted in this districting algorithm, and allow Korporate Amerika to strategically locate their factories and who they hire at them (American workers vs. "guest" workers), so that they can control where American voters are hired and have them located in places conducive to setting districts up in their favor. A lot more opportunities for manipulating the system.
Springslips
(533 posts)To me it seems not about giving others more than one vote, it is creating districts counting eligible voters instead of the correct, current way of total population. Even if he won the case, it would be still one person, one vote. Unless I am missing something. The article never made the argument that it leads to the death of one person, one vote.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)"One man, one vote" (or "one person, one vote" is a slogan that has been used in many parts of the world where campaigns have arisen for universal suffrage. During the 20th-century period of decolonisation and the struggles for national sovereignty, from the late 1940s onwards this phrase became widely used in less developed countries where majority populations were seeking to gain political power in proportion to their numbers.
The phrase was used in this form in an important legal ruling in the United States related to voting rights; applying the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that state legislatures needed to redistrict in order to have congressional districts with roughly equal represented populations. In addition, the court ruled that both houses of state legislatures needed to have representation based on districts containing roughly equal populations, with redistricting as needed after censuses.[1] Many urban areas of the United States had been long underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures due to the failure of the latter to redistrict according to population.
Some states redrew their U.S. House districts every ten years to reflect changes in population patterns; many did not. Some never redrew them, except when it was mandated by a change in the number of seats to which that state was entitled in the House of Representatives. In many states, this led to a skewing of influence for voters in some districts over those in others. For example, if the 2nd congressional district eventually had a population of 1.5 million, but the 3rd had only 500,000, then, in effect since each district elected the same number of representatives a voter in the 3rd district had three times the voting "power" of a 2nd-district voter. Alabama's state legislature resisted redistricting from 1910 to 1972 (when forced by federal court order.) As a result, rural residents retained a wildly disproportionate amount of power in a time when other areas of the state became urbanized and industrialized, attracting greater populations. Such urban areas were underrepresented in the state legislature and underserved; their residents had difficulty getting needed funding for infrastructure and services. They paid far more in taxes to the state than they received in benefits in relation to the population.[
In various reapportionment cases decided by the US Supreme Court in the 1960s, notably Wesberry v. Sanders, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Baker v. Carr, the court ruled that districts for the United States House of Representatives, and for the legislative districts of both houses of state legislatures, had to contain roughly equal populations, and required redistricting to meet this standard. The U.S. Senate was not affected by these rulings, as its makeup was explicitly established in the U.S. Constitution.
The cases concerning malapportionment ended the pattern of area-based representation in the U.S. House and state legislatures; these corrected imbalances between rural and urban populations. Eventually the rulings were extended over local (city) districts as well, as in Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote
Springslips
(533 posts)Thanks.
Writers need to consider the audience and explain such concepts, knowing not every reader is verse in such sophisticated legalisms. That of course isn't gete nor there, but your explaination outlined the readoning quite clearly.
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)Nor even all 'eligible voters'. We send them to office to represent ALL of us, even those too young to vote, or who can't vote for other reasons.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)Initech
(100,102 posts)DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)cheat.
LiberalArkie
(15,728 posts)Edit: and by own, I mean free and clear.
Disgusting. I don't recognize my country anymore.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)They PANIC at the thought of white people being less than 50% of the population.
But then they act like total PRUDES when it comes to sex.
Go figure.
sulphurdunn
(6,891 posts)of the founding of the republic when free people were counted as a person even though only property owning white males could actually vote, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for apportionment and Indians weren't counted at all.
I guess only eligible voters should have political representation in Blum's best of all possible republics of some people, by some people and for some people.
UTUSN
(70,740 posts)It don't have nothing to do with one-person/one-vote: It's about population representation (not).
Beartracks
(12,821 posts)Therefore, you shouldn't have to be a voter in order to be counted amongst the population of your Congressional District. Period. Congressionals represent EVERYone in their districts, not just the voters.
This is one of those whiny-ass cases where a conservative cooks up some reasonable-sounding excuse -- "only count eligible voters" -- in order to engineer something that damages representative democracy.
Another example, for that matter, was gutting the VRA on the general assumption that "racism in America is over because, look, we have a black man as President."
And a typical all-too-common example is gerrymandering that -- surprise -- benefits only Republicans.
By the way, that last example is why it's important to vote in mid-terms, people. When Democrats don't vote, it doesn't help just the Republican candidate -- it helps a whole lot of future Republican candidates, too.
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octoberlib
(14,971 posts)We're livin' it in NC.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)No morality either.