The Supreme Court has ruled that the right to redistrict election maps ultimately remains
under the discretion of state lawmakers, that scary.
This practice known as gerrymandering, has long come under the fire for its tendency
to be heavily partisan influence, often disenfranchising voters in their own district.
Legal journalist Mollye Barrows is here to talk about this.
We've seen it in Florida haven't we?
Oh my gosh.
I think, I made, I made this map.
It's almost, this is, it's, it's, it's like an upside down hummingbird.
You know, we got, you have districts that look like.
That's exactly right.
They talked about the funny names they give them.
So why did they give it a pass?
What, why did they?
For the same reason that they have consistently.
You know, the, the US Supreme Court has yet to find that a redistricted map is "unconstitutional,"
based on essentially that they have no clear standard by which to determine if excessive
gerrymandering has occurred.
So while they recognize gerrymandering has occurred, when it comes to like murder for
example, I know this is a strange example, but you know you have your degrees, first
degree, second degree, intentional manslaughter.
I mean, I think basically what they're saying is, yeah, we know gerrymandering happened.
We're just not sure we can officially measure how bad it was.
And what makes it worse than this?
Right.
You got first degree politics, second degree politics, third degree manslaughter politics.
Right, right.
And so we're okay with that.
Look, this is a cop out...
Yes I agree.
By the Supreme Court.
I mean to say, well you know, kind of looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
Right.
But I don't think it's a duck because we can't prove it's a duck.
It is so lame.
It's unbelievable.
What's the margin that this came out?
Five to four and it was interesting because I read part of the decision, at least one
of the justices was saying over and over again, it is with a heavy heart that I descend to
this decision because basically I feel like it's clear that gerrymandering has occurred.
So it comes from these two states, North Carolina and Maryland, and they both essentially made
the same claims, except they said North Carolina had been redistricted in favor of Republicans
and Maryland had been redistricted in favor of Democrats.
And so they both were at the lower courts, had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and it
went to the Supreme Court and they said the same thing.
Oh boy, sure looks like y'all been gerrymandered but we sure can't do much about it.
So what a shame.
Yeah.
I mean you have the evidence there.
Right.
You know, it's not like the, the, the evidence is clear that it's politics.
Absolutely.
So the Supreme Court then says, well, we can't subjectively read politics into it.
You states are going to take care of that yourselves.
Right.
Okay.
They've got, they've got history.
They know what the history is.
They've got the repetitive nature of how odd the gerrymandering is.
That's evidence.
Right.
Certainly, you have plenty circumstantial evidence to decide.
The third part of it is that the law makers themselves...
Right.
Will, we can't get them under control.
That's what's missed in this you see.
In the, in this whole analysis, the Supreme Court goes to this checklist, oh well we can't
prove this.
We can't prove, it's like, it's like circumstantial evidence.
Right.
And they ignore the fact the thing they don't take into consideration is it's pretty evident
than in a Republican state, you're going to have Republican gerrymandering.
Of course.
In a democratic state, you're gonna have Democrat.
So what's your take?
Well, basically the Supreme Court again punted to the states and they said that the lower
courts are going to have to deal with this on a state level.
So that does give states, the Democratic Party, some power in for instance, if they want to
go into a state like Pennsylvania, which recently had some redistricting, which helped out Democrats.
So they can say, hey, even though we're not going to get any help from the Supreme Court,
in fact, Michigan just ruled that a redistricted map there in April was gerrymandered.
But it was a federal court that made that decision and because of the Supreme Court's
rule, they had ordered that map to be redrawn and now it doesn't have to be redrawn.
So that happened in Michigan.
But at the state level, they can still do more things like set up commissions that help
with the process of oversight and they want them to be nonpartisan.
And Republicans, as you might imagine, are not really on board with that.
So they're preparing to fight any organized democratic effort on a state level to do that.
I, I can make a prediction right now and there's people, I mean, there are people that do what
I'm about to say.
There are people that can sit down and look at the gerrymandered map, specifically run
algorithms on the gerrymandered map and tell you who's going to be the next president.
Yeah, they even talked about that in this decision.
They can tell you who's going to be the next Senator.
Right.
There's no guesswork.
So, so voters basically feel disenfranchised.
And they're right.
Because I gotta tell ya, if you look at this map, Trump's gonna win again.
Absolutely.
And the people And that's the goal, isn't it?
The people who, who do these algorithms will tell you, you know, it's not just the Democrats
have put together a clown like quality candidates.
It is that I don't care if you had the perfect candidate, the gerrymandering map makes it
so difficult to, to win and these algorithms work on just being able to go, taking the
detailed time and and analyze each gerrymandered kind of area and tell you what's going to
happen in the election.
Yes, and then what's interesting about this decision too is they even took some of that
math and they went back and said, if you hadn't done what you had done, then the results would
have been x, y and z.
Would have been different.
Yes, yes.
You wouldn't have had so many more Republican legislator.
You would have had x number of more democratic legislators.
So you're exactly right.
Everyone's perfectly aware of exactly what's going on.
And Supreme Court knows this.
Yes.
Is what I'm trying, I'm trying to tell you, I'm sure that part of the brief, I didn't
read the briefs, I didn't hear the oral arguments on this, but I'm sure in there they would
say they, they could tell the panel judges, we can tell you who's going to win by algorithms
because of the gerrymandering.
And what it does is it takes away the interest of the voter to say, you know, I'm going to...
That's right.
I'm going to take my time, I'm going to go fight through this.
I'm going to go vote.
I'm going to try to make a difference.
Because the truth is they really, they really don't put much emphasison that.
Well it's not democracy.
Yeah.
That's the bottom line.
It's a blow to democracy.
Yeah.
If, if, if our are representatives are supposed to be elected by the people and represent
the people's voice, they have effectively taken away that voice.
31 states draw their own districting lines, 31.
So for the courts to put that back, that's great.
But it's basically putting the fox back in charge of the henhouse and saying, do better
boys.
Yeah these brilliant...
We sure hope your grassroots organizations can help out.
Brilliant state legislators.
Mollye, thank you for joining me okay.
Thanks Pap.