Tag: United States Secretary of Commerce

Cheating isn’t winning. Political cheating allows those who engage in it to amass far more power than they have a right to in a constitutional democracy. And on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that turns on whether Maryland’s gerrymandered district boundaries deprive Republicans of fair representation in Congress. Such concerns have increased exponentially with President Trump targeting undocumented immigrants with a proud and public ferocity. The lateness of his decision means the citizenship question will not be subjected to the bureau’s usual extensive testing for the effect of new inquiries on the accuracy of the overall count. California is one of at least 12 states trying to block the move. And political cheating at its purest and most obvious is gerrymandering — drawing district lines to maximize your party’s representation in legislative bodies and minimize the number of seats your opponents can win. Because so many of the state legislatures that drew district lines after the 2010 Census were controlled by Republicans, an end to gerrymandering now would be especially challenging to the GOP. In Maryland, a formerly Republican district based in the rural and western parts of the state was chopped up, its pieces redistributed in a way that reduced the GOP to only one seat in the state’s eight-member House delegation. The increasingly aggressive activism of conservative judges has made this a live concern on the left as well.