Supreme Court allows severe partisan gerrymandering to continue

[BmorePat87]

(06-27-2019, 12:01 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I'll take a stab, but could be way wrong.  You are asking them to declare that something is unfair to one party over another.  Parties are private entities, not a part of the government.  Deciding that one party having an advantage over another and fixing it isn't in their jurisdiction. There is no right for a party to have a certain chance of winning. It's hard for me to explain what I'm thinking here.

This makes sense and, as Matt said, I get why it was ruled this way. The Courts can intervene when gerrymandering creates scenarios where citizens are not equally represented. In Tennessee, the state refused to redraw maps to show the population shift from rural to urban, resulting in the underpopulated urban areas to have more seats than the cities. As a result, Baker v Carr allowed the Judiciary to come in and force them to have equal representation.

In these cases, people are equally represented, but their political affiliation is not. There's no constitutional right to that equal political representation.

The liberal justices dissent and say "but the fact that this is happening essentially means our democracy is being significantly harmed" and that's true. Whether or not a justice can make a power grab for the good of democracy (a bit of a contradiction) is then their question, but the conservative justices are not on board with that. 

End result is whoever gerrymanders better and at a higher rate (Republicans) will continue to succeed at it unless there's a constitutional amendment (which there won't be because of gerrymandering) or their state constitutions are amended (possible in some of those states). I can see Maryland doing the latter but not North Carolina, and that is why Democrats lose elections.