I haven’t been in law school in many years, but I suspect there would be one of two approaches.
The argument NBZ laid out. Courts don’t get to overrule every bad rule. They can go after clear racial gerrymandering because race is a protected category so governmental actions on the basis of race are more suspect and require more justification. “Mere partisanship” is not as suspect, so courts will be less involved and more deferential to decisions made by other branches of the government. They don’t want courts weighing in on every map and substituting their judgment for the outcomes produced by the legal process.
Some professors do teach a version of “it’s all BS.” Depending on how far they lean towards legal realism, they can view (almost) everything through the lens of power dynamics and see the courts as just another venue for politics. They also acknowledge that judges are human beings with flaws and biases rather than robots who strictly apply some law to a particular set of facts.
I think most other nations delegate to a non-partisan commission that doesn’t answer to a specific party. Does anyone make the argument that is a worse system than the US?
It might be my own bias, but I’m having a hard time thinking of an argument that would Steelman the gerrymandering is good argument. Even the SCOTUS majority doesn’t really argue that partisan gerrymanders are “good” it simply argues that the courts are not the proper venue for stopping them. And, if you take the “originalists” at face value (lol) courts playing the correct role and not venturing into areas that they should not be involved in is its own kind of good (even if it may lead to a “bad” outcome in some sort of utilitarian analysis)
ETA: I think if America were designing a system from scratch, it would pick a nonpartisan system. However, because we have the system we already have, there is a powerful group of people that benefit from the status quo and are therefore focused on best exploiting the current system instead of changing it. In recent history, red state gerrymanders tend to be worse, but blue state legislatures have drawn some crazy districts too (and when they don’t they are often accused of “unilaterally disarming” and told that they need to aggressively gerrymander in order to help the national Democratic party keep up with the shenanigans of Red State Republicans)
Ya. The whole debate feels like arguing over the best way to treat a self inflicted gunshot wound instead of just not shooting yourself in the first place!
the number of people who understand that George Floyd was murdered is many orders of magnitude higher than the number of people who participated in an organized protest.
The number of people who are paying attention to SCOTUS ethics issues is basically a rounding error in comparison
Sure gerrymandering leads to bad outcomes for the majority, but it also creates jobs for extremist morons who would otherwise be unemployable, so it’s impossible to say if it’s good or bad
What’s funny is this board is above 90% on board with legal realism, rule of law is a farce, etc, but also like at least 75% on board with sovereignty being real and nations being people the way US courts say corporations are people, and believe all foreigners need to give their entire lives to UP’s morals surrounding sovereignty rather than prioritizing peace (even negative peace) and order the way UPers are allowed to prioritize
If you live in Russia, where there’s no democracy, everything Russia does is your fault and you need to shoot your commanding officer if you want a chance at being human
If you live in the West, where there’s democracy, you can’t really be blamed for what your country does, and actually it’s irrational to make the slightest sacrifice to your lifestyle to attempt to influence anything
Like it’s not really good faith to minimize it as an inside baseball ethics issue when it’s on all the late night talk shows and infiltrates the meme universe
So Alito wasn’t lying. I still have questions though. First, how did she manage to hoist this novelty flag up the pole? Did she attach it with a hairclip or something?
Comments are kind of funny. Seems like lefties are mad at post for not reporting it earlier and righties are mad because they think that wapo intentionally held the story to bring it out in an election year.