The Supreme Court is allowing California to use its new congressional map for this year’s midterm election, clearing the way for the state’s gerrymandered districts as Democrats and Republicans continue their fight for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The state’s voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas’ new GOP-friendly map, which President Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.
And in an unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court’s majority denied an emergency request by the California’s Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state’s GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.
SCOTUS rulings are not the constitution. While the country operated on the idea that a supreme court ruling was final law for a few decades, the Roberts court forever destroyed the idea of binding precedent when they discarded Roe v Wade.
Racial gerrymandering is now effectively constitutional so long as there’s a fig leaf of partisanship. While SCOTUS could plausibly jump the other way in the future, Congress is literally the primary body of the US federal government, and has all the power they want to ban gerrymandering in house districts and plausibly even local jurisdictions.
Which is why… I’m saying… We need a constitutional amendment… to make it illegal outright to gerrymander.