Tag: Supreme Court

CNN's Anderson Cooper breaks down President Donald Trump's response after the Supreme Court ruled a citizenship question could not be included on the 2020 census. #CNN #News

New York Attorney General Letitia James joins MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber to discuss why she’s fighting Trump in the Supreme Court to protect immigrants, challenging the administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. »…

New York, California and Maryland judges block White House census citizenship question plans; insight from SCOTUSblog co-founder Amy Howe. FOX News operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Radio, FOX News Headlines 24/7, FOXNews.com and…

Time magazine clings to liberal model of journalism. FOX News operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Radio, FOX News Headlines 24/7, FOXNews.com and the direct-to-consumer streaming service, FOX Nation. FOX News also produces FOX…

Time magazine under fire for putting Brett Kavanaugh on 100 most influential list; reaction from 'Benson and Harf' hosts Guy Benson and Marie Harf. FOX News operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Radio, FOX…

Gillian Turner reports that former Clinton press secretary, Brian Fallon is trying to get Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh fired as a guest professor in the U.K. FOX News operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX…

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court returns to the subject of partisan gerrymandering on Tuesday, considering for a second time in two years whether drawing election maps to help the party in power can ever violate the Constitution. Last year’s cases, from Wisconsin and Maryland, raised the possibility that the court might decide, for the first time, that some election maps were so warped by politics that they crossed a constitutional line. On Tuesday, almost exactly a year after they last considered the Maryland case, the court will again hear arguments from Republican voters there who said their rights had been violated by a congressional district they said had been drawn to diminish their voting power. The court will also hear arguments in a second challenge, this one from North Carolina Democrats who said the state’s congressional map yielded a 10-to-3 Republican majority despite very close statewide vote counts. But Justice Kennedy’s replacement by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh makes such an outcome less likely, election law experts said. But it has never struck down a voting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Last year, after the Supreme Court returned the case to the United States District Court in Maryland, a three-judge panel of that court ruled for the challengers, barred state officials from conducting further congressional elections using the 2011 maps and ordered them to draw new ones. “Partisan gerrymandering is noxious, a cancer on our democracy,” he wrote. The ruling found that Republican legislators there had violated the Constitution by drawing the districts to hurt the electoral chances of Democratic candidates. In 2016, the court said, Republican congressional candidates won 53 percent of the statewide vote.

If an adjective creates a redundancy, does preceding it with two other adjectives give the Supreme Court a reason to venture where it has never gone before? The justices should, like Ulysses, listen to this siren song but bind themselves from obeying it. Tuesday’s issue is whether the court should attempt something for which it has neither an aptitude nor any constitutional warrant — concocting criteria for deciding when (adjective two) excessive partisan gerrymandering becomes (adjective three) unconstitutional. Gerrymandering is generally as surreptitious as a brass band and is, always and everywhere, as political as lemonade is lemony. Until 1962, the court stayed away from the inherently political process of the drawing of district lines by legislatures organized along partisan lines because the Constitution is unambiguous: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” There are enough open-textured terms in the Constitution (“establishment” of religion, “unreasonable” searches, “cruel” punishments, etc.) So, the Constitution is explicit: Congress, not the judiciary, is the federal remedy for alleged defects in the drawing of congressional districts. The political branches of the state and federal governments are assigned to deal with the inherently value-laden politics of drawing district lines. These include criteria for measuring unconstitutional excesses in the common practices of “cracking” (dispersing one party’s voters across districts dominated by the other party) and “packing” (one party concentrating the other party’s voters into supermajorities in a few districts). And the political science professoriate stands ready to eagerly tutor the court about “wasted votes” resulting from “efficiency gaps.” Today, people who are unhappy about North Carolina’s gerrymandering argue (as a lower court did) that “the Constitution does not authorize state redistricting bodies to engage in … partisan gerrymandering.” (Emphasis added.) The Constitution is silent regarding limits on state legislatures’ partisan redistricting practices and is explicit regarding Congress’ exclusive power to modify these practices.

The Constitution makes clear that legislative redistricting is a matter for the states and Congress, not the courts, to sort out. If an adjective creates a redundancy, does preceding it with two other adjectives give the Supreme Court a reason to venture where it has never gone before? The practice the court will consider is (adjective one) “partisan gerrymandering.” This modifier, however, does not modify; there is no other kind of gerrymandering. Tuesday’s issue is whether the court should attempt something for which it has neither an aptitude nor any constitutional warrant — concocting criteria for deciding when (adjective two) excessive partisan gerrymandering becomes (adjective three) unconstitutional. Until 1962, the court stayed away from the inherently political process of the drawing of district lines by legislatures organized along partisan lines because the Constitution is unambiguous: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” There are enough open-textured terms in the Constitution (“establishment” of religion, “unreasonable” searches, “cruel” punishments, etc.) Furthermore, the political realists who framed the Constitution, and who understood the pervasiveness of partisanship, added the following to the elections clause quoted above: Congress may “at any time by law make or alter such regulations” as the states might write regarding congressional elections. So, the Constitution is explicit: Congress, not the judiciary, is the federal remedy for alleged defects in the drawing of congressional districts. The political branches of the state and federal governments are assigned to deal with the inherently value-laden politics of drawing district lines. And the political-science professoriate stands ready to eagerly tutor the court about “wasted votes” resulting from “efficiency gaps.” Today, people who are unhappy about North Carolina’s gerrymandering argue (as a lower court did) that “the Constitution does not authorize state redistricting bodies to engage in . The Constitution is silent regarding limits on state legislatures’ partisan redistricting practices and is explicit regarding Congress’s exclusive power to modify these practices.

WASHINGTON — If an adjective creates a redundancy, does preceding it with two other adjectives give the Supreme Court a reason to venture where it has never gone before? The justices should, like Ulysses, listen to this siren song but bind themselves from obeying it. Tuesday’s issue is whether the court should attempt something for which it has neither an aptitude nor any constitutional warrant — concocting criteria for deciding when (adjective two) excessive partisan gerrymandering becomes (adjective three) unconstitutional. Gerrymandering is generally as surreptitious as a brass band and is, always and everywhere, as political as lemonade is lemony. Until 1962, the court stayed away from the inherently political process of the drawing of district lines by legislatures organized along partisan lines because the Constitution is unambiguous: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” There are enough open-textured terms in the Constitution (“establishment” of religion, “unreasonable” searches, “cruel” punishments, etc.) So, the Constitution is explicit: Congress, not the judiciary, is the federal remedy for alleged defects in the drawing of congressional districts. The political branches of the state and federal governments are assigned to deal with the inherently value-laden politics of drawing district lines. These include criteria for measuring unconstitutional excesses in the common practices of “cracking” (dispersing one party’s voters across districts dominated by the other party) and “packing” (one party concentrating the other party’s voters into supermajorities in a few districts). And the political science professoriate stands ready to eagerly tutor the court about “wasted votes” resulting from “efficiency gaps.” Today, people who are unhappy about North Carolina’s gerrymandering argue (as a lower court did) that “the Constitution does not authorize state redistricting bodies to engage in … partisan gerrymandering.” (Emphasis added.) The Constitution is silent regarding limits on state legislatures’ partisan redistricting practices and is explicit regarding Congress’ exclusive power to modify these practices.