Anti-democratic actions by the US Supreme Court
Michael Green
Anti-democratic actions by the US Supreme Court
By Tom Carter
24 January 2012
...Voting rights
In a case decided on January 20, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling requiring a lower court to show more “deference” to a congressional redistricting plan developed by the state of Texas, notwithstanding the fact that the plan is plainly in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The ruling in that case, Perry v. Perez, as well as a ruling putting off a decision in a related West Virginia case, casts a shadow over the continued viability of the Voting Rights Act and the principle of “one-person, one-vote.”
Supreme Court commentator Lyle Denniston observed in an article last Friday on SCOTUSblog.com entitled “New View on One-Person, One-Vote?” that a lower federal court order blocked by the Supreme Court in the West Virginia case had declared that the principle of “one-person, one-vote” required “zero variance” in population between congressional districts as the norm. Accordingly, he wrote, the Supreme Court’s actions have “raised doubts about the authority of federal District Courts to require states to achieve absolute equality of population in drafting new voting boundaries.”
Under the challenged West Virginia plan, certain districts have thousands more members than the others, with the ultimate result that Republican votes count more than Democratic ones.
The Texas redistricting plan is, by all accounts, simply a maneuver to squeeze more Republican congressional seats out of a state already infamous for congressional districts that are gerrymandered into bizarre and irrational shapes. The Supreme Court decision on Friday legitimizes and encourages such brazenly undemocratic schemes.
As numerous commentators have observed, it is surely more than a coincidence that, in an election year, the Supreme Court has taken so many contentious cases and decided them on terms favorable to the extreme right. ...