"The Supreme Court... cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map intended to give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives."

"In a one-sentence order, the justices turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place for the last several federal elections in the state while their challenge to the map moves forward. There were no public dissents from the court’s ruling."

SCOTUSblog reports.

"The court’s order came exactly two months after the justices, over a dissent by the court’s three Democratic appointees, granted a request from Texas to allow it to use a new map intended to allow Republicans to pick up five additional House seats in that state.... The challengers [in the California case] argued that the state’s goal all along had been 'offsetting a perceived racial gerrymander in Texas.'... The state countered... that the new map was not racially motivated. More broadly, it contended, the challengers were 'asking the Court to treat California’s map differently from how it treated Texas’s map, thereby allowing a Republican-led State to engage in partisan gerrymandering while forbidding a Democratic-led State from responding in kind.'"

So both states — and all states — can politically gerrymander to their heart's content. The Court isn't going to look too closely at whether something racial is really going on.

"The government has announced it will lower the voting age to 16 for all UK elections in time for the next general election...."

"Including 16- and 17-year-olds in the electorate does not change election outcomes and it does not make elections less representative. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds are just as qualified to vote as other, older voters. Research from Germany and Austria shows that they are able to pick a political party or representative that best represents their views to the same extent as other, slightly older voters. But some things may get better for young people and for democracy overall, especially if young people are taken seriously as voters and receive good education on political issues...."

Writes Christine Huebner, a lecturer in quantitative social sciences at the University of Sheffield, in "What happens when 16-year-olds get the vote? Other countries are already seeing the benefits" (Guardian).

Oh, please don't let this happen in the U.S. As I see it, 16 year olds will get the vote... when they turn 18. There's no problem to fix. By the way, I didn't get to vote until I was 21. 

"Kids: They’re pint-size spies. They’re little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they’ve grokked enough to knock you into the gutter."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Book/'Vera, or Faith' follows a 10-year-old girl navigating family drama and a dystopian America" (NYT).

1. Garner, the name, is not a "garner (the word!)" spotting, within the logic of the Althouse blog.

2. "One day they’ve grokked enough" might be one of the last appearances of "grok," the verb, in this Musk-permeated word.

3. I just finished reading "Vera, or Faith" last night. That's why I'm reading a review of it this morning. The quote I pulled from the review was chosen because of that "grokked."

4. About that dystopia — to quote the book — "[T]he states are having their constitutional conventions. And these conventions will decide whether to give an 'enhanced vote'... counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called 'exceptional Americans,' those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains."

5. Lots of novels use that child as pint-size spy idea, don't they? I think of "What Maisie Knew" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." You can think of more. Or ask Grok. But whether the character is a child or not, many novels make their plot out a character gradually putting clues together and figuring something out. The thing to be figured out may not be an interesting story at all — who killed X, who is X's father/mother, why did X leave town all these many years ago. The story is the unlocking of the mystery. But to make the central character a child is to blend this mystery-solving with the mystery-solving that is every child's life: What do words mean? What are adults doing? Where do I fit into all this?

6. "Vera, or Faith" (commission earned).

"Trump orders states to require proof of citizenship in federal elections" — can he do that?

 The WaPo article quotes "election experts" who, unsurprisingly, say he can't.

Trump’s order directs the Election Assistance Commission to change the federal voter registration form to require voters to provide government-issued documentary proof of citizenship. Under his order, voters could use passports or REAL IDs to prove citizenship but not birth certificates....

“The aim here is voter suppression pure and simple,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen wrote on his blog. ... Hasen questioned the legality of the measure because the president does not oversee the Election Assistance Commission.

"All Voters who believe in Common Sense should GET OUT TO VOTE EARLY for Brad Schimel. By turning out and VOTING EARLY, you will be helping to Uphold the Rule of Law..."

"... Protect our Incredible Police, Secure our Beloved Constitution, Safeguard our Inalienable Rights, and PRESERVE LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL."

That's how Trump put it on Truth Social, quoted in "Trump Jumps Into a Major Wisconsin Court Race With an Endorsement/The president threw his support to Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate in a race for control of the battleground state’s top court. Elon Musk has spent millions of dollars on the contest" (NYT).

Does it help a state supreme court candidate to be so closely aligned with Trump? Don't we — a lot of us — think judges should be politically neutral arbiters of the law? 

Well, as Trump portrays it, it's the other side that's political. His guy is there to uphold the law and protect our rights. Trump is a political figure, but he respects the traditional values of the judiciary and vouches for Brad Schimel as an upholder of those values. Of course, that's utter garbage to the other side. This is the conventional discourse of judicial elections in Wisconsin. It's possible that the appeal to traditional values motivates conservatives more than liberals, but is Trump's position on traditional values credible, or does his appearance fire up the Trump haters?

Most important here is that the judicial election is isolated from more political elections, so there tends to be a low turnout. There are a lot of people in Wisconsin who love Trump. Maybe these people wouldn't even notice the judicial election or wouldn't bother to vote, but if Trump says, come on, this matters, get out there, maybe they'll stampede to the polls. Yes, it's a cue to Trump haters to get out there and cancel those votes, but the anti-Trumpers are a step behind.

The relevant election day is April 1st. Trump says vote early. If you wait until election day, you might forget or you might have something else going on.

"Good trouble."

Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair of @FEC. There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it. I’ve been lucky to serve the American people & stir up some good trouble along the way. That’s not changing anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/7voecN2vpj

— Ellen L. Weintraub (@ellenlweintraub.bsky.social) (@EllenLWeintraub) February 6, 2025

Readers of this tweet need to remember that "good trouble" is a stock phrase, not some impish creation of Weintraub's. It's serious. As Grok tells us: "good trouble" was used by John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Congressman, to describe his experience participating in protests and civil disobedience.

I can see that some people are reading her tweet to mean that she's refusing to leave, but you don't need to read it that way. On the text alone, I would say she might be abiding by his demand that she leave, even though she also wants to say that he did not use the proper method. Is she going to stay where she's been told to leave?  The reference to "good trouble" might suggest that she is, but it's in a sentence written in the past tense: "I’ve been lucky...."

From the NYT article on the subject:

I'm reading and listening to "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."

This is an interview in the NYT (free access link to the edited transcript/I listened to the full audio in the NYT audio app). Here's an excerpt. The boldface is the interviewer David Marchese:

You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.

Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.

Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.

"The three [Arizona Democratic] state officials learned a computer glitch meant 98,000 voters had not provided proof of citizenship. In a candid phone call, they debated what to do."

The Washington Post reports (free-access link).

Their predicament was “an urgent, a dire situation,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Washington Post. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said critics would “beat us up no matter what the hell we do.” Attorney General Kris Mayes worried they would be accused of rigging the 2024 election in a crucial state....

"I’ve cried and prayed every night for over six years straight that I would remain a free Black woman."

"I was thrown into this fight for voting rights and will keep swinging to ensure no one else has to face what I’ve endured for over six years, a political ploy where minority voting rights are under attack."

Said Crystal Mason, quoted in "Woman Who Received 5-Year Sentence in Voter Fraud Case Is Acquitted/A Texas appeals court reversed its earlier opinion that had upheld the conviction of Crystal Mason, who was found guilty of illegally casting a provisional ballot in 2016, even though she claimed she hadn’t known she was ineligible to vote" (NYT).

Mason, a convicted felon, was ineligible to vote, and the question was whether the prosecution needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she knew she was ineligible.

Was Mason used in a political ploy? Did blackness matter? She says yes to both questions, and your opinion may depend on whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. If so, doesn't that tend to prove it was a political ploy? But who has the burden of proof on that? Nobody. And no one will ever definitively answer that question. You already know what you believe. And in that fog, who wants to see Crystal Mason spend 5 years in prison? Not the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

"My father... really wanted me to be a boy"/"Too bad, you'd have made a wonderful girl."

I'm watching that this morning because I'm watching a lot of Glynis Johns clips because Glynis Johns — who lived to be 100 — has died: "Glynis Johns, Who Played Mrs. Banks in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100/The actress also received an Oscar nomination for 'The Sundowners' and won a Tony for Sondheim’s 'A Little Night Music,' where she sang 'Send in the Clowns'" (Hollywood Reporter).

Bonus:

"The decision merely says that 'state courts do not have free rein' and that they may not 'transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review...'"

"'... such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.' The court offers no concrete understanding nor any example of what that means. It’s clear that a majority was cobbled together among conservative and liberal justices by agreeing to decide this part of the case in the narrowest terms.... [T]he state court interpreted general provisions in the state constitution — such as that requiring elections to be 'free and fair' — to in effect ban partisan gerrymandering. Whether this decision transgresses ordinary judicial review or exemplifies it remains a mystery. Had the court resolved that question, it would have provided much-needed guidance for 2024.... Judicial minimalism can be a virtue in many contexts.... But in the context of election law, it can be a vice. Elections benefit greatly from clear rules laid out well in advance of Election Day.... Clear rules specified in advance are all the more important in this era of pervasive distrust and suspicion concerning elections...."

Writes lawprof Richard H. Pildes in "The Supreme Court Rejected a Dangerous Elections Theory. But It’s Not All Good News" (NYT).

The love for clear rules is easier to express after the Court has rejected the clear rule your opponents were pushing. 

ADDED: Pildes declines to mention Bush v. Gore, but that's the precedent here. From the majority opinion in yesterday's case, Moore v. Harper:

"The Supreme Court, in a surprise decision, ruled that Alabama had diluted the power of Black voters by drawing a congressional voting map..."

"... with a single district in which they made up a majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion in the 5-to-4 ruling. He was joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Voting rights advocates had feared the decision would undermine the Voting Rights Act, which instead appeared to emerge unscathed. The chief justice wrote that there were legitimate concerns that the law 'may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the states.' He added: 'Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.'"

 Writes Adam Liptak at the NYT.

"Instead of trying to legislate within the lines of Supreme Court case law — lines that might be redrawn tomorrow — liberal lawmakers should view the court primarily as a hostile political actor..."

"... with its own distinctive political incentives, internal divisions and weaknesses.... To confront a hostile Supreme Court, the people and their elected leaders need to be confident that they, too, have the power and the obligation to interpret the Constitution.... To persuade Americans that stern court-curbing measures are necessary, progressives must first convince enough Americans that the court is dead wrong about the Constitution.... This term, this court will decide how far to go in shutting down both affirmative action and race-conscious protections for equal opportunity in the voting arena.... [T]he right-wing court has decided that these amendments prohibit race-conscious efforts to redistribute some political and economic power and opportunity to Black Americans. Progressives today should do more than argue that such efforts are something the Constitution permits. They should explain instead — as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did on her first day on the bench — that the Constitution here means just the opposite of what the Supreme Court majority says. Measures like the Voting Rights Act, which the court has been gutting, are what the Constitution demands.... The rights this court denies and the laws it strikes down are often ones the Constitution demands...."

From "How Liberals Should Confront a Right-Wing Supreme Court" by lawprofs Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath in the NYT.

Presented for discussion, not in agreement, though I don't disagree with every word of it.

The reference to Justice Jackson is to the oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan (beginning at page 57 in the transcript):

"This brief provides a rare and important opportunity for federal Supreme Court justices to receive direct input from their peers who sit on state supreme courts."

"State justices have a central stake in this case because, in our federalist system, they typically have the final say over the meaning of state law, and here they can directly explain to their federal counterparts why their traditional state role is worthy of protection."

Said lawprof Evan Caminker, quoted by Adam Liptak in "Top State Judges Make a Rare Plea in a Momentous Supreme Court Election Case/In a surprising filing, state chief justices opposed an argument pressed by Republicans — that state legislatures may set federal election rules unconstrained by state constitutions" (NYT).

The state judges are fighting for their own power against the "independent state legislature theory." According to the theory, the federal constitutional text — “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” — means that state legislatures have the final say about state law, with no interpretive role for the state judges.

Liptak writes:

100 years ago today, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the 19th Amendment.

The case was Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, with Justice Brandeis writing for the Court:

On October 12, 1920, Cecilia Street Waters and Mary D. Randolph, citizens of Maryland, applied for and were granted registration as qualified voters in Baltimore City. To have their names stricken from the list Oscar Leser and others brought this suit in the court of common pleas. The only ground of disqualification alleged was that the applicants for registration were women, whereas the Constitution of Maryland limits the suffrage to men.

"[State voting] laws — like that recently passed in Georgia — are far from the nightmares that Dems have described, and contain some expansion of access to voting."

"Georgians, and Americans in general, overwhelmingly support voter ID laws, for example. Such laws poll strongly even among allegedly disenfranchised African-Americans — whose turnout in 2012, following a wave of ID laws, actually exceeded whites’ in the re-election of a black president. In fact, the normalization of ID in everyday life has only increased during the past year of vax-card requirements — a policy pushed by Democrats. And Biden did something truly dumb this week: he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in November now that his proposal for a federal overhaul has failed: 'I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit.' No sitting president should do this, ever. But when one party is still insisting that the entire election system was rigged last time in a massive conspiracy to overturn a landslide victory for Trump, the other party absolutely needs to draw a sharp line. Biden fatefully blurred that distinction, and took the public focus off the real danger: not voter suppression but election subversion, of the kind we are now discovering Trump, Giuliani and many others plotted during the transition period.... And why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this 'Jim Crow 2.0'? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states — three states Obama singled out for criticism — and found that they had already died in committee. To argue as Biden did last week in Georgia that the goal of Republicans is 'to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore,' is to add hyperbole to distortion...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "How Biden Lost The Plot/Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected" (Substack).

"Number one: Anybody who listened to the speech — I did not say that they were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor."

"I said we’re going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then. You either voted on the side — that didn’t make you a George Wallace or didn’t make you a Bull Connor. But if you did not vote for the Voting Rights Act back then, you were voting with those who agreed with Connor, those who agreed with — with — And so — and I think Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like I was attacking them. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t attacked anybody publicly — any senator, any — any congressman publicly. And my disagreements with them have been made to them — communicated to them privately or in person with them. My desire still is — look, I underestimated one very important thing: I never thought that the Republicans — like, for example, I said — they got very upset — I said there are 16 members of the present United States Senate who voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. Now, they got very offended by that. That wasn’t an accusation; I was just stating a fact. What has changed? What happened? What happened? Why is there not a single Republican — not one? That’s not the Republican Party. ... So, that’s not an attack.... Look, I still contend — and I know you’ll have a right to judge me by this — I still contend that unless you can reach consensus in a democracy, you cannot sustain the democracy....  I believe we’re going through one of those inflection points in history that occurs every several generations...."

From the transcript of Biden's press conference. Biden was responding to a question about his campaign promise that his “whole soul” was dedicated to “bringing America together, uniting our people.” Instead of reaffirming that dedication, he found a new basis for dividing people — the misinterpretation of his Georgia speech. "Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like" he was attacking his opponents. He was attacking his opponents, and really harshly — yelling at people who don't support the current voting rights legislation.

By the way, I've been noticing that the supporters of the Voting Rights Act rarely if ever mention any specific provisions of the text. They say "voting rights" but not which rights. I'll bet very few Americans have any idea what is in the bill, what rules states will actually need to follow if it is passed. The political discourse is woefully impoverished, abstractions and accusations of nefariousness.

""[Biden's Georgia speech] was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party..."

"... in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels.... If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—'In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time'—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges. By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center...."

Writes Peggy Noonan, in "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point/He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him" (Wall Street Journal).

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 

Said Mitch McConnell, quoted in "McConnell rips Biden’s voting rights speech as ‘profoundly unpresidential’" (NY Post). 

I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me. 

"Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions."

Adam Liptak reports (in the NYT).

The new case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, concerned two kinds of voting restrictions in Arizona. One required election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other made it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.” 

The law made exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials. The larger battle in the case was not whether the particular challenged restrictions should survive. The Biden administration, for instance, told the justices in an unusual letter that the Arizona measures did not violate Section 2. 

But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s interpretation of Section 2, which would have limited its availability to test the lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions. Section 2 bars any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

Here's the opinion. Of course, it's 6 to 3.