There's a Small Ray of Sunshine in the Supreme Court's Gerrymandering Ruling
The Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, really, really doesn't want to be the mapmaker of last resort when it comes to constructing electoral districts in the several states. Earlier this year, the Court ruled, 5-4, that partisan gerrymandering in the states was beyond the reach of the federal courts. So it was no surprise that, on Monday, the Court threw out a lower court ruling that mandated that Michigan re-draw its maps prior to the 2020 elections. The Court's action on Monday was an unqualified win for the Republicans in Michigan. From the Detroit Free Press:
The panel issued a 146-page opinion saying that Republicans who drew and enacted new political boundaries after the 2010 Census did so in a way that either packed Democratic voters into districts or diluted their numbers in other districts in such as way as to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decision in the Maryland and North Carolina cases — which both parties complained of gerrymandering, which is the practice of drawing district lines in such a way as to help one political party or another — effectively ensured that the Michigan decision would be vacated, however... Because of the decision, Michigan's political lines will remain in place at least until 2022, when a bipartisan commission created by a statewide referendum last year is expected to take over the process of drawing those boundaries.
However, the ray of sunshine in this situation remains the fact that the Supreme Court recognizes the right of state courts to declare that partisan gerrymandering violates various state constitutions, which is pretty much the only way for this sort of case to go now. In addition, as Michigan demonstrated, states can improve their redistricting problems through referenda. But the Supreme Court wants no part of this question.
More important this week was the Supreme Court's acceptance of a challenge to the constitutionality of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the independent federal agency tasked with clawing back money from the various vampires and lycanthropes of the country's financial sector. The challenge is based on the fact that the commissioner of the CFPB works alone and that he can only be fired "for cause" which, needless to say, is almost impossible. The plaintiff in the case is Selia Law, a debt-relief firm that received inquiries from the CFPB regarding what the bureau called questionable telemarketing techniques. This question has arisen before. In 2016, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court found the bureau's structure was unconstitutional. That majority opinion was written by...wait for it...then-circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Two years later, when the entire D.C. Circuit heard the case, it upheld the bureau's constitutionality. Now that Kavanaugh has been bumped up to the Supreme Court, there would seem to be the inevitable 5-4 majority to rule against the bureau. It also is notable that the administration* has joined in the attack on one part of its own executive branch. If you're a glass half-full kind of person, you can argue that, at least, if a Democratic president is inaugurated in 2021, he or she will be able to fire the present director of the CFPB, Kathy Kraninger, friend to the payday-loan industry, at will. If doom has been in your eyes since January of 2017, you can easily speculate that, given the conservative majority on the Court, this could be a monumental win for that constitutional heresy known as the "unitary executive" theory. That's something I'd rather not strength while the current president* is still running his rave in the Oval Office.
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