#gerrymanders — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #gerrymanders, aggregated by home.social.
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Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy
-- in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy:
if Donald #Trump, rightwing courts, #gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican #caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional #chaos over the certification of this presidential election, 👉two men cleared the path.
The single-minded determination of #Leonard #Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US #supreme #court and ♦️stacked lower and state courts with Republican #ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.
#Chris #Jankowski masterminded the partisan #gerrymanders that ♦️tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans,
♦️ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and ♦️rendered elections in Wisconsinand North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar.
They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.
What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice #John #Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and 💥making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it
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It’s this whole thing that’s scary going on in this country, that if you can’t defeat people’s votes then you do it in some other way.
#Protasiewicz won #Wisconsin’s supreme court election in April, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court, their first in 15 years. But Republicans began to float #impeaching Protasiewicz before the results were even known.
The party has already locked down control of the legislature, using aggressive #gerrymanders to protect itself from election defeats.
It has also deflated the powers of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, undercutting his #authority to appoint people to executive branch positions.
https://boltsmag.org/wisconsin-impeachment-protasiewicz/