RascalRiley wrote:
A radical and baseless legal theory could upend the country’s most essential democratic process.
By Thomas Wolf and Ethan Herenstein
Members of the supreme court’s conservative supermajority just last week took the next step in a little-noticed, but extremely dangerous, project: attempting to jam into law a radical misinterpretation of the Constitution’s elections and electors clauses, which, if successful, would create electoral chaos across the country. Before next summer, and well in advance of the 2024 presidential election, the Court could strip state courts and state constitutions of their ability to check and balance state legislators when they make laws for federal elections, giving partisan majorities near-total control over how voters cast ballots and how those ballots are counted. And it would make the current Court—which already has a horrible track record on voting rights—the ultimate judge of whether the legislatures’ actions are legal.
The notion at the core of their project—the so-called independent-state-legislature theory—is on the fringes of American jurisprudence, so far out there that its few proponents have struggled to dredge up even the barest scraps of case law and history to substantiate it. But its supporters on the Court seem to believe they’ve found a shortcut around all of that with a case named Moore v. Harper, which they’ve just added to the Court’s docket for its term starting this fall.
The appeal traces back to this February, when the North Carolina Supreme Court undid an extreme partisan gerrymander of the state’s congressional map that would have given Republicans a large advantage in races for House seats. Several Republican state legislators asked the Supreme Court to restore the biased map for this spring’s primary elections. Their emergency filings claimed that the North Carolina state supreme court didn’t have the power to even review the legislatively drawn congressional map, despite the fact that the map violated several guarantees in the state’s constitution, because, in their view, neither state courts nor state constitutions should have a say in how federal elections are run.
If the legislators’ theory sounds radical, that’s because it is. It’s based on a stark misreading of the constitutional provisions that assign responsibility for regulating federal elections. Those clauses give that power to the “legislature” of each state (while reserving to Congress the ultimate power to set the rules). Fixating on the term legislature, proponents of the theory insist that the clauses grant exclusive and nearly unlimited power to those legislatures to run federal elections. The ordinary checks and balances of democracy—such as executive officers vetoing laws and courts reviewing and striking down the legislature’s acts—fall by the wayside. The theory would create a vacuum of lawlessness in the most dangerous of places: elections.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/how-supreme-court-could-upend-integrity-our-elections/670472/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20220711&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily
A radical and baseless legal theory could upend th... (
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It is all a matter of perspective. If my side is drawing up the maps, we are doing everything fair and square. The problem is when the other side gets to draw the maps. That's when we learn all about gerrymandering and being unfair. Notice I do not identify which side is republican or democrat. It works both ways. The term gerrymandering comes from the early 1800s Massachusetts and Democrat governor Eldridge Gerry, who drew district maps to ensure his party stayed in power. It doesn't mean he was the first. It just means he upset enough people that the derisively named the practice for him.