The Future Of The Democratic Party Will Be Decided By The Supreme Court
If you don’t like gerrymandering, you should blame the Supreme Court. In the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, four conservative justices said that they would forbid federal courts from hearing challenges to partisan gerrymanders, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion was only slightly less dismissive of these lawsuits. The result is that state lawmakers have been free to draw maps that entrench their party and lock out the other party, even though such maps violate voters’ First Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court is also complicit in the wave of “curbs on voting rights” that Yglesias notes in his piece. In a party-line vote, a 5-4 Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, enabling many voter ID laws, gerrymandered maps and other legislation that would have otherwise been blocked to go into effect. Similarly, the Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board effectively greenlighted Voter ID laws — one of the most common examples of state laws that exclude voters likely to support Democrats. The Court’s plurality opinion cited concerns about in-person voter fraud to justify this outcome, even though the opinion could only find one example of such fraud occurring in the United States within the preceding 140 years!
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/19/3713681/if-democrats-ever-want-to-pass-a-law-again-they-need-to-control-the-supreme-court/
This is why we need either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton as president.
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