Will this US supreme court case uphold American democracy? | Russ Feingold
On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments on whether a redistricting plan in the state of Wisconsin was unconstitutional. The case could transform US politics
On Tuesday, the US supreme court hears oral arguments in Gill v Whitford. This will open the door for a potentially precedent-setting ruling on the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering – the process of redrawing electoral districts in order to favor one party over another.
The past several years have seen a new level of hyper-partisan gerrymandering that defies voters and has subverted our democracy. Thus far, however, the court has refused to rule on the constitutionality of this political ploy, deferring instead to the political process.
The result is a system that demands immediate course correction. While there is progress to be made at the state level, in today’s political climate, the supreme court is best poised to demand the needed course correction before this illegitimate political ploy further distorts our elections.
The idea of drawing district lines to benefit one party or the other is not new. However, a confluence of specific events over the past decade has made gerrymandering a lethal science to our democratic legitimacy.
Those events include the 2010 Citizens United ruling that unleashed record amounts of dark money into our elections; the 2013 Shelby County v Holder ruling that undid a central pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and innovations in computer programming.
Our democracy cannot afford another election cycle where voters are a minor detail in determining winners
Broadly speaking, Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in terms of numbers. More voters identify as Democrats in this country than as Republicans, and the margin is growing as our country becomes more diverse.
Republicans experienced this disadvantage in 2008 when President Obama was elected amid a wave of Democratic victories across the country, resulting in Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches. While the loss was devastating to Republicans, the timing was convenient.
Republicans understood then that they were facing a long-term, if not permanent, numerical disadvantage, and in response they set out to game the system. They looked ahead to the 2010 census, knowing that district maps would be re-examined with the latest census data. They seized upon this in developing a strategy to win more seats with fewer votes using a toxic combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
In the 2010 election, Republicans targeted certain individual districts in certain states, aiming to flip state legislatures. In the wake of the January 2010 Citizens United ruling, the floodgates of dark money were opened going into elections that November, enabling Republicans to overwhelm strategic local races.
At the local level, a couple of hundred thousand dollars can swing an election, particularly at a time when Democrats did not see the broader strategy at play and did not anticipate the financial assault on these local races. Republicans gained control of a majority of state legislatures in 2010, giving them control over redistricting in those states.
In control of state houses, Republicans had the intent of gerry-rigging elections, and new technology gave them the means. Whereas gerrymandering used to be done with paper maps and by mapping experts, it’s now down by computers and mathematicians.
Technology is such now that a computer can compute all the data derived from a census, including race, gender, income and education, and spit out hundreds of different mapping options in no time.
More importantly, computers can draw maps that almost guarantee which party will win which district. Computers can go house by house, using publicly available information to calculate how each house will vote, and then deciding whether to include it in one district or another.
The result is district maps that “pack” voters of one party into a few districts or “crack” voting blocs into multiple districts, diminishing their influence. Either way almost guarantees a certain party will win a majority of districts, regardless of whether they win a majority of votes.
In 2013, the supreme court gave the Republican party yet another advantage in Shelby County v Holder, wherein the court overruled a central pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and released certain states from having to seek federal preclearance before making changes to voting laws, including redistricting.
Suddenly, maps that would have certainly raised concern and probably would have been rejected by the Department of Justice were put in place with no federal oversight.
The electoral results since the 2010 census have steadily locked in Republican majorities in multiple states, despite the popular vote continuing to favor Democrats.
This is how President Obama was able to win decisively in 2012, and yet Democrats lost ground in legislative races. The Republicans have successfully installed a system that almost guarantees them a majority of legislative seats with a minority of votes.
This is inherently undemocratic and betrays our system of government. I am not arguing this because my party is receiving the short end of the stick, but rather because it is making a mockery of our democracy.
Our system of government is meant to protect the power of voters and to result in a government that represents the voters. Instead, we now have a system deliberately meant to manipulate and beat the voters in order to lock in a government that intentionally does not represent the voters.
This confluence of events makes it difficult for voters to reverse gerrymandering on their own, and nearly impossible to do so in time for the 2018 elections, and potentially those in 2020. Our democracy cannot afford another election cycle where voters are a minor detail in determining winners.
We need courts to invalidate the practice of hyper-partisan gerrymandering, and force state legislatures to redraw the districts and maps that make voters irrelevant and our elections a rubber stamp. The supreme court will have an opportunity to do just that.
Russ Feingold is a former Democratic senator for Wisconsin
