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SCOTUS: The Next Big Case
Unless you’re a long-time legislative redistricting activist or watcher, you’d be forgiven for not knowing who the late U.S. Rep. Phil Burton (D-CA) was.
Burton, a hard lefty and an intensely partisan Democrat, enjoyed encyclopedic knowledge of California geography and demographics. Elected to the California legislature in 1956, he was in charge of redistricting right after the 1960 census. In 1964, he was elected to the U.S. House from San Francisco. Along with this brother and fellow U.S. Rep. John Burton, he engineered subsequent drawings of California’s congressional lines to ensure our largest state’s delegation was solidly Democratic, at least until he passed away in 1983.
Why does political party have an effect on setting the boundaries for Congressional districts? What would happen in this process if the political parties did not exist?
What would boundaries look like if the people tasked to drawing them were denied demographics other than the raw number of people in any area?
The left will do what it always does which is to ignore the the law.
They want to save our democracy, that has no basis for existence, instead of our Constitution to which the elected Leftists swore an oath to uphold. When the Republicans get control of the House they should impeach every Leftist who acts overtly in violation of that oath.
No one would be denied demographic or other information. The question is whether the court would leave the door open to the crazy districts created by Phil Burton or the one 11 years ago in PA. Some state constitutions have “compactness” and “contiguous” requirements that respect political borders and jurisdictions. Those might hold if in the state constitution or state law.
Those people would have to find some proxy criterion to achieve their desired results, then.
Our largest state? By what metric? Geography or population?
One township, one vote.
We do the same. See Texas and Florida.
Shame on the Democrats for Illinois.
Thank goodness, the Courts stopped the terrible Democrat gerrymander of New York.