UPDATE: 3 boxes of cases. The first 2 from Sotomayor and Breyer are about sentencing guidelines. The 3rd case, is written by Kennedy — as the cases are announced from the most junior Justice to the most senior, meaning only the Chief remains — is Lozman v. Riviera Beach:
In 2006, Fane Lozman was arrested when he got up to speak at a city council meeting. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, arguing that his arrest was retaliation for activities protected by the First Amendment – specifically, filing a lawsuit against the city and his criticism of city officials. A federal appeals court ruled against him, holding that he could not win on his retaliatory arrest claim because there was probable cause for police to arrest him.Only Thomas dissents. Here's the PDF of the opinion:
Held: The existence of probable cause does not bar Lozman’s First Amendment retaliation claim under the circumstances of this case. Pp. 5–13.UPDATE 2: The gerrymandering case is out. Whitford (my colleague) loses: No Article III standing. Opinion here. Will make new post.
(a) The issue here is narrow. Lozman concedes that there was probable cause for his arrest. Nonetheless, he claims, the arrest violated the First Amendment because it was ordered in retaliation for his earlier, protected speech: his open-meetings lawsuit and his prior public criticisms of city officials. Pp. 5–6....
AND: There are no dissents in Gill v. Whitford.
ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which KENNEDY, GINSBURG, BREYER, ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., joined except as to Part III. KAGAN, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, and SOTOMAYOR, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.ALSO: The separate post on Gill v. Whitford is here.
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Live blogging the ten commandments would be a good movie.
Dissent written by Jesus.
I'm interested to see if this ruling would affect the horrible, unconstitutional precedent set in Pennsylvania.
My position on gerrymandering has "evolved" over the years. I'm a software developer and a mathematician. I can guarantee you that you can write a pretty simple program to divide a state into Congressional Districts in a completely non-partisan way.
It wouldn't be that hard.
It would also likely be a terrible idea.
Gerrymandering is a terrible way to divide up districts. It's one redeeming quality is that it may be less terrible than any other way you can come up with.
We end up with gerrymandered districts because we arrange the districts based upon similarities of the people in them, i.e. income levels, age, housing, and yes, ethnicity. And that sounds awful, but is it? I mean, if you think about it, don't you really want that? That way the people there can elect a representative that is more likely to represent all of their interests.
If you create districts by math, you might end up with multi-millionaires in the same district as minimum wage assisted housing development just because they're only 1 mile apart. But do those two groups have the same interests? The same needs from government? Can one representative truly represent them? Do either of these groups even care about the needs of the other? I don't believe in segregation, but segregation of representation maybe isn't an awful idea.
Chris Breisch said...
We end up with gerrymandered districts because we arrange the districts based upon similarities of the people in them, i.e. income levels, age, housing, and yes, ethnicity.
If that was all there was to it, I would say that this was a non-issue. But gerrymandering is more than that. It is grouping people based on any/all of those factors when it is beneficial to the party drawing the districts, and splitting up such people when that is beneficial.
I'm not saying the courts should throw out politically gerrymandered maps. I don't think they have a politically unbiased measure of how much gerrymandering has taken place. As such, the throwing-out itself becomes a political act.
According to the US Constitution, the Democrat Party's votes must be optimized.
Maybe districts with millionaires and poverty would be better as it might better represent the common interest instead of identity politics as at present. Of course it would never stand today.
Gerrymandering has several purposes.
One of them is to create safe seats guaranteed to re-elect incumbents or a certain sort of candidate. It is often in place to ensure that there are a certain number of black representatives, for instance, where a more objective system could lock them out.
But the most usual purpose is to optimize the effectiveness of a voting block. By creating as many areas as possible with just enough of a partisan majority to make it highly probable that the party would take the seat. The other consequence is to concentrate voters for the other party as much as possible, to minimize the number of seats they can take.
The first purpose quite neatly fits into the second, in many cases. The need to create as many black constituencies as possible serves both that ethnic block and their opponents. Republicans are tacitly (or perhaps not so tacitly) in cahoots with black politicians on this. An arrangement that concentrates black voters maximizes opportunities for both black politicians and Republicans. Win-win.
The black-politician interest is rarely mentioned in complaints about gerrymandering.
So the gerrymander case is kicked down the road. Will be after the 2020 elections no doubt. Then the case will be moot because the districts will be redrawn by the time the case gets back to the Supreme Court.
Also, evidence from the 2016 and 2018 elections will undermine the plaintiffs claims. Walker was elected governor twice and staved off a recall. Trump won Wisconsin. The Dems need a better state to test their theories in.
I'm reading about a lot of punting, and rulings so narrow I don't understand why the Court even bothered to hear them.
A radio show caller suggested that keeping the party registration of voters private would help to mitigate gerrymandering.
AJ Lynch said...
A radio show caller suggested that keeping the party registration of voters private would help to mitigate gerrymandering.
Probably not. Voting totals from each polling place are ( and must be ) available. That is enough to do the vast majority of gerrymandering. If needed, they can add in real estate tax information.
Chris Breisch said...
My position on gerrymandering has "evolved" over the years. I'm a software developer and a mathematician. I can guarantee you that you can write a pretty simple program to divide a state into Congressional Districts in a completely non-partisan way.
It wouldn't be that hard.
It would also likely be a terrible idea.
No, it wouldn't. If you think it's important to group together people of similar incomes, add that to the algorithm
The main issue right now is that drawing compact, contiguous districts that honor physical and political boundaries currently favors the GOP, because of the way Democrats stuff themselves into bubbles.
What they're demanding is not an end to gerrymandering, what they're demanding is that the courts counter-gerrymander to undo the effects of the Democrats' choices.
As we can see from Kagan's "concurrence", one more Democrat appointee, and that's what we'll end up with
"Held: The existence of probable cause does not bar Lozman’s First
Amendment retaliation claim under the circumstances of this case."
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula just perked up his ears.
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