MARYLAND’S GERRYMANDERING ORDERED UNCONSTITUTIONAL BY FED JUDGES (PG COUNTY)

MARYLAND’S GERRYMANDERING ORDERED UNCONSTITUTIONAL BY FEDERAL JUDGES (PG COUNTY):

VOTERS WHO DID NOT SUPPORT DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES WERE OFTEN PUNISHED POLITICALLY AFTER ELECTIONS.

CONGRESSIONAL MAPS MUST NOW BE REDRAWN PRIOR TO 2020 ELECTION.

FAIR ELECTIONS ARE WHAT DEFINES AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.

LEGAL CITIZENS OF ALL RACES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO VOTE FOR CANDIDATES OF THEIR CHOICE WITHOUT FEAR.


Post Sources: Washington Post


**** Federal judges in gerrymandering case toss Maryland’s congressional voting map


Federal judges in Maryland on Wednesday blocked the state from using its congressional voting map in future elections, ordering political leaders to draw new electoral lines for contests in 2020.

The three-judge panel unanimously threw out the congressional map in a long-running partisan gerrymandering case. The decision gives Maryland officials until March to submit a new redistricting plan.

The judges acknowledged the inherently political redistricting process but declared the boundaries unconstitutional and intentionally designed to target Republican voters in the 6th Congressional District because of their political affiliation.

“When political considerations are taken into account to an extreme, the public perceives an abuse of the democratic process,” wrote Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. He was joined by U.S. District Judge George L. Russell III.

Chief U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar wrote a separate opinion agreeing with the overall judgment and declaring partisan gerrymandering “noxious, a cancer on our democracy.”

If the state is unable to meet the deadline for creating a new map, the court’s order establishes a commission that will create a map of its own.

The Wednesday ruling can be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which in June avoided answering the question of when extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional in the Maryland case and in another map case from Wisconsin.

The office of Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D), which defended the map, said Wednesday that it is reviewing its options. Legislative leaders declined to comment on the court’s order.

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who won reelection Tuesday, called the decision “a victory for the vast majority of Marylanders who want free and fair elections.”

“We remain steadfastly committed to moving forward in an open and transparent manner that is free of the partisan influence that has dominated the redistricting process in Maryland for far too long,” said Hogan, who has pushed for a constitutional amendment that would have an independent redistricting commission redraw boundaries.

At the core of the issue is the 6th District in Western Maryland, which was ­redrawn in 2011 to include parts of heavily Democratic Montgomery County. Democratic mapmakers moved hundreds of thousands of voters from Western Maryland out of the 6th District and added Democrats from Montgomery.

The lawsuit was brought by seven Republican voters who lived in the 6th District before the boundaries were reset.

In its ruling Wednesday, the three-judge panel declared the district unconstitutional and found that the state intended to lessen the influence of GOP voters by replacing them with Democrats in violation of the First Amendment right to political association.

“The massive and unnecessary reshuffling of the Sixth District, involving one-half of its population and dictated by party affiliation and voting history, had no other cause than the intended actions of the controlling Democratic officials to burden Republican voters by converting the District” into a Democratic one, Niemeyer wrote in his 59-page opinion.

The court ruling came a day after Democrat David Trone defeated Republican Amie Hoeber by a wide margin in that district, in what was considered the most competitive of Maryland’s House contests.

In a deposition in the case, former governor Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, was blunt about the partisan mapmaking he oversaw, saying Democratic leaders intentionally redrew the districts to try to give their party an advantage.

“Yesterday’s results confirm what we’ve been saying all along. The 6th District isn’t really competitive for Republicans,” said attorney Michael B. Kimberly, who represents the group of Maryland Republicans.

The ruling rejected the argument from the attorney general’s office that Democratic leaders intended only to make the 6th District more competitive.

“It is impossible to flip a seat to the Democrats without flipping it away from the Republicans,” Niemeyer wrote. “There can be no doubt that at every stage of the process, the State’s Democratic officials who put the 2011 redistricting plan in place specifically intended to flip control of the Sixth District from Republicans to Democrats and then acted on that intent.”

The ruling applies to the entire Maryland congressional map as drawn in 2011, but the challengers have proposed a modification at the border between the 6th and 8th districts that could address the court’s concerns without affecting the shape of the other districts.

Before the ruling Wednesday, state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) cast doubt on the possibility of an independent commission without a sign-on from other states — Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — to ensure Maryland Democrats are not at a political disadvantage on Capitol Hill.

“To put that in play without all of those states having to abide by the same rules is not going to happen,” Miller said.

Fair Elections Laws In Trouble?...US Supreme Court To Decide

NY Times----

A Threat to Fair Elections


The US Supreme Court may be about to radically change politics by striking down the longstanding rule that says corporations cannot spend directly on federal elections. If the floodgates open, money from big business could overwhelm the electoral process, as well as the making of laws on issues like tax policy and bank regulation.

The court, which is scheduled to hear arguments on this issue on Wednesday, is rushing to decide a monumental question at breakneck speed and seems willing to throw established precedents and judicial modesty out the window.

Corporations and unions have been prohibited from spending their money on federal campaigns since 1947, and corporate contributions have been barred since 1907. States have barred corporate expenditures since the late 1800s. These laws are very much needed today. In the 2008 election cycle, Fortune 100 companies alone had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. That dwarfs the $1.5 billion that Federal Election Commission-registered political parties spent during the same election period, or the $1.2 billion spent by federal political action committees.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the limitations on corporate campaign expenditures. In 1990, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and again in 2003, in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, it made clear that Congress was acting within its authority and that the restrictions are consistent with the First Amendment.

In late June, the court directed the parties to address whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. It gave the parties in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission a month to write legal briefs on a question of extraordinary complexity and importance, and it scheduled arguments during the court’s vacation.

All of this is disturbing on many levels. Normally, the court tries not to decide cases on constitutional grounds if they can be resolved more simply. Here the court is reaching out to decide a constitutional issue that could change the direction of American democracy.

The court usually shows great respect for its own precedents, a point Chief Justice John Roberts made at his confirmation hearings. Now the court appears ready, without any particular need, to overturn important precedents and decades of federal and state law.

The scheduling is enormously troubling. There is no rush to address the constitutionality of the corporate expenditures limit. But the court is racing to do that in a poorly chosen case with no factual record on the critical question, making careful deliberation impossible.

Most disturbing, though, is the substance of what the court seems poised to do. If corporations are allowed to spend from their own treasuries on elections — rather than through political action committees, which take contributions from company employees — it would usher in an unprecedented age of special-interest politics.

Corporations would have an enormous say in who wins federal elections. They would be able to use this influence to obtain subsidies, stimulus money and tax loopholes and to undo protections for investors, workers and consumers. It would take an extraordinarily brave member of Congress to stand up to agents of big business who then could say, quite credibly, that they would spend whatever it takes in the next election to defeat him or her.

The conservative majority on the court likes to present itself as deferential to the elected branches of government and as minimalists about the role of judges. Chief Justice Roberts promised the Senate that if confirmed he would remember that it’s his “job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

If the court races to overturn federal and state laws, and its well-established precedents, to free up corporations to drown elections in money, it will be swinging for the fences. The American public will be the losers.



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Sources: NY Times, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google Maps