#rucho — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #rucho, aggregated by home.social.
-
America's partisan gerrymandering mess dates back to a 2019 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Rucho v. Common Cause, "the five Republican judges held that court challenges to partisan gerrymanders could not go forward in federal courts because such cases present a 'political question,'" Jay Willis writes for Balls and Strikes. "What is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in 'Rucho' always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair. You do not need to be a Supreme Court justice to understand that a California map that would turn Kamala Harris’s 58 percent vote share in 2024 into 94 percent of power in the House does not allow for equal participation in the political process.
But this is the price that 'Rucho' is forcing millions of voters to pay."#USLaw #USSupremeCourt #SupremeCourt #JohnRoberts #RuchoVCommonCause #Rucho
-
America's partisan gerrymandering mess dates back to a 2019 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Rucho v. Common Cause, "the five Republican judges held that court challenges to partisan gerrymanders could not go forward in federal courts because such cases present a 'political question,'" Jay Willis writes for Balls and Strikes. "What is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in 'Rucho' always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair. You do not need to be a Supreme Court justice to understand that a California map that would turn Kamala Harris’s 58 percent vote share in 2024 into 94 percent of power in the House does not allow for equal participation in the political process.
But this is the price that 'Rucho' is forcing millions of voters to pay."#USLaw #USSupremeCourt #SupremeCourt #JohnRoberts #RuchoVCommonCause #Rucho
-
The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas,
with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states,
👉 was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court,
💥declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.
Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts
– drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests
– to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting.
“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,”
dissenting justices warned in 2019,
🆘 “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
That decision in
🔸"Rucho v. Common Cause"
has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy.
The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court’s decision last year in
♦️"Trump v. United States",
which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines).
🔥Trump has taken the 2024 ruling as a blank check, tearing through democratic norms.
The gerrymandering case also lifted a federal guardrail.
Lawsuits challenging extreme partisan gerrymanders can still be brought before state court judges.
But state laws vary widely in their protections for redistricting practices -- and state judges differ in their ability to police the thorny political process.
#rucho #Gerrymander #trump
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/04/politics/gerrymandering-supreme-court-texas -
The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas,
with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states,
👉 was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court,
💥declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.
Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts
– drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests
– to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting.
“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,”
dissenting justices warned in 2019,
🆘 “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
That decision in
🔸"Rucho v. Common Cause"
has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy.
The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court’s decision last year in
♦️"Trump v. United States",
which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines).
🔥Trump has taken the 2024 ruling as a blank check, tearing through democratic norms.
The gerrymandering case also lifted a federal guardrail.
Lawsuits challenging extreme partisan gerrymanders can still be brought before state court judges.
But state laws vary widely in their protections for redistricting practices -- and state judges differ in their ability to police the thorny political process.
#rucho #Gerrymander #trump
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/04/politics/gerrymandering-supreme-court-texas -
On the U.S. Supreme Court
—Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican majority have spent decades systematically dismantling the guardrails of American democracy.Itself the product of unprecedented norm-breaking
—encouraged by a fifty-year special interest campaign designed to weaponize the judicial branch
—it is the Roberts majority that has hastened our endemic institutional collapse.We can draw a straight line, for example,
from the Roberts Court’s 2010 #Citizens #United decision, which invalidated Congress’s bipartisan campaign finance limits on the farcical premise that independent expenditures could not be corrupting,
to the imminent shadow presidency of erratic mega-billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest outside spender.Citizens United set the stage for the proliferation of political nonprofits and the establishment of #Super #PACs,
giving oligarchs like Musk a megaphone loud enough to drown out ordinary voters.The decision turbocharged Trump’s rise, allowing his allies to flood the airwaves with disinformation and propaganda,
meanwhile trapping Democrats in a system of corporate-funded campaigns that has eroded their ability to represent the working class.Three years later, in #Shelby #County v.#Holder, John Roberts completed his career-long vision quest to dismantle the Voting Rights Act,
invalidating its preclearance requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination.Erasing the national consensus first achieved in the bloody crucible of the Civil Rights Era
and repeatedly reaffirmed by near-unanimous bipartisan Congresses, Roberts deemed racial discrimination a relic of ancient history,
declaring that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”A flood of Republican state voter suppression laws followed, funded, and orchestrated by the same interests to which Roberts owed his majority.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in her searing Shelby County dissent.But soaking us was the whole point.
The downpour continues.Final results for the 2024 House elections were tallied recently, and Republicans will owe a razor-thin 220-215 majority to the three seats the GOP flipped thanks to the North Carolina legislature’s brazenly partisan gerrymander,
a move blessed by the Supreme Court’s Republican justices’ 2018 decision in #Rucho v. #Common #Cause.In that case, the Roberts Court
—so power-hungry that leading legal scholars have dubbed it the “Imperial Court”
—conveniently found that #partisan #gerrymandering,
-- a practice dominated by norms-be-damned Republican state legislatures,
-- presented a “political question” that was outside their purview to resolve. -
On the U.S. Supreme Court
—Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican majority have spent decades systematically dismantling the guardrails of American democracy.Itself the product of unprecedented norm-breaking
—encouraged by a fifty-year special interest campaign designed to weaponize the judicial branch
—it is the Roberts majority that has hastened our endemic institutional collapse.We can draw a straight line, for example,
from the Roberts Court’s 2010 #Citizens #United decision, which invalidated Congress’s bipartisan campaign finance limits on the farcical premise that independent expenditures could not be corrupting,
to the imminent shadow presidency of erratic mega-billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest outside spender.Citizens United set the stage for the proliferation of political nonprofits and the establishment of #Super #PACs,
giving oligarchs like Musk a megaphone loud enough to drown out ordinary voters.The decision turbocharged Trump’s rise, allowing his allies to flood the airwaves with disinformation and propaganda,
meanwhile trapping Democrats in a system of corporate-funded campaigns that has eroded their ability to represent the working class.Three years later, in #Shelby #County v.#Holder, John Roberts completed his career-long vision quest to dismantle the Voting Rights Act,
invalidating its preclearance requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination.Erasing the national consensus first achieved in the bloody crucible of the Civil Rights Era
and repeatedly reaffirmed by near-unanimous bipartisan Congresses, Roberts deemed racial discrimination a relic of ancient history,
declaring that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”A flood of Republican state voter suppression laws followed, funded, and orchestrated by the same interests to which Roberts owed his majority.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in her searing Shelby County dissent.But soaking us was the whole point.
The downpour continues.Final results for the 2024 House elections were tallied recently, and Republicans will owe a razor-thin 220-215 majority to the three seats the GOP flipped thanks to the North Carolina legislature’s brazenly partisan gerrymander,
a move blessed by the Supreme Court’s Republican justices’ 2018 decision in #Rucho v. #Common #Cause.In that case, the Roberts Court
—so power-hungry that leading legal scholars have dubbed it the “Imperial Court”
—conveniently found that #partisan #gerrymandering,
-- a practice dominated by norms-be-damned Republican state legislatures,
-- presented a “political question” that was outside their purview to resolve. -
Dobbs will further intensify Republican attacks on democracy - Lawyers, Guns & Money
Direct democracy is by no means a panacea. But it is an important mechanism for preserving a role for the people.
That’s especially true at this moment, with grossly gerrymandered legislatures passing draconian bans that endanger women’s health and freedom — and with threats to democracy extending well beyond the topic of abortion.
It’s worth noting that extreme gerrymandering matters even when it will typically not shift partisan control of the legislature per se. Ohio Republicans don’t need gerrymandering to win control of the state legislature in most elections. But it is enormously helpful if you want to govern like Mississippi Republicans in Ohio.
Rucho v. Common Cause (where the Supreme Court ruled it could not set a constitutional standard against partisan gerrymandering) was a critical predicate for Dobbs.
#directdemocracy #gerrymandering #votersuppression #whitesupremacy #authoritarianism #rucho #dobbs
-
Dobbs will further intensify Republican attacks on democracy - Lawyers, Guns & Money
Direct democracy is by no means a panacea. But it is an important mechanism for preserving a role for the people.
That’s especially true at this moment, with grossly gerrymandered legislatures passing draconian bans that endanger women’s health and freedom — and with threats to democracy extending well beyond the topic of abortion.
It’s worth noting that extreme gerrymandering matters even when it will typically not shift partisan control of the legislature per se. Ohio Republicans don’t need gerrymandering to win control of the state legislature in most elections. But it is enormously helpful if you want to govern like Mississippi Republicans in Ohio.
Rucho v. Common Cause (where the Supreme Court ruled it could not set a constitutional standard against partisan gerrymandering) was a critical predicate for Dobbs.
#directdemocracy #gerrymandering #votersuppression #whitesupremacy #authoritarianism #rucho #dobbs