Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Republicans’ Coup de Grace On Voting Rights?

Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case called Evenwel v. Abbott. The case involves an issue of increasing importance to American politics: Congressional Redistricting. Hear the oral argument recording @  DemBlogNews: SCOTUS May Change How Congress Represents America

» The Voting News
It got to the Supreme Court because conservative litigators with a successful track record of fighting against the right to vote are trying to turn the logic of pro-voter rights decisions on their head. And it’s very possible that they may succeed again.

This most recent battle in the voting rights war involves two of the Warren Court’s most important decisions.
One of the tactics that state legislatures used to disenfranchise African-Americans before 1964 was to draw district lines (or refuse to revise them) in ways that left minority voters massively underrepresented.

In Alabama in 1964, for example, some counties included 40 times more people than others. In Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court held that such schemes were illegal.

States were required to adhere to a “one person, one vote” standard when apportioning their legislatures. Combined with robust enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, these landmark cases helped to end Jim Crow disenfranchisement schemes.
Perversely, the Evenwel v. Abbott lawsuit hopes to use these decisions to turn back the clock and dilute the representation of minority voters. The theory of the lawsuit is that Texas violated the Equal Protection Clause when it drew its district lines based on total population rather on the population of voters. The state, according to the theory, should only be able to conduct apportionment according to the number of eligible voters.

If adopted, the theory presents an obvious practical problem. Total population is measured with reasonable reliability by the Census. Eligible voters are much harder to measure, not least because the numbers change every election. (What should be counted — presidential election years? Off years? State elections? Some combination?) The discretion the measure would leave to legislators leaves the process open to more of the kind of manipulation that Reynolds v. Sims tried to minimize. Plus, it just seems illogical for a state’s representation in Congress to be based on total population, but its districts drawn by eligible voters.

Which brings us to the even bigger problem with the theory: In most cases, the effect of the rule change would be to over represent white voters and under represent minority voters. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick puts it, “if the plaintiffs win this appeal, power will shift markedly from urban voters to rural voters and to white and Republican districts over minority and Democratic ones.” To read the Equal Protection Clause to not merely permit but require the under representation of minority voters is, to say the least, perverse.

Full Article: Scott Lemieux - The Week: Republicans’ coup de grace on voting rights?.

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