Once you've legalized bribery and influence-peddling, and declared the Day of Jubilee on which racism had vanished entirely from our election procedures, legalizing gerrymandering is a pretty easy lift. By the customary five-to-four margin, the Supreme Court completed its term by doing exactly that on Thursday. (It also invalidated the citizenship question for this year's Census, for which it gets merely a muted hoorah, as we shall see in a moment.)

Throughout the state election cycles of 2010 to 2016, legislatures in several states were gifted with Republican majorities that proceeded to rig their district maps in such a grotesque way as to ensure their survival no matter what inconvenient impulses might arise among the populace to create inconvenient electoral majorities. These states included North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. As TPM explained:

The Republican Party carried out a two-pronged plan in the 2010 election cycle, first working to sweep state-level races and obtain GOP control of statehouses across the country. In many states — most notably North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin — they then drew maps that some lawmakers admitted were intended to create uncompetitive districts and lock in control for their party.

Particularly since the 2016 election, voting rights advocates and reform groups in states like Missouri and Michigan have successfully fought to provide citizens with more say in the redistricting process. Michigan voters passed a constitutional amendment to create an independent commission that controls how maps are drawn in the state. Conservative justices signaled during oral arguments in March that they would use examples like Michigan’s to argue that there was no need for the courts to intervene in the redistricting wars.

Ah, but the problem there is that, for example, the Michigan state senate, where a Republican majority created by the rigged maps still survives, has been jacking around with the independent commission for which the citizens voted overwhelmingly by referendum. It has used budget gimcrackery as its primary method for defying the will of the voters. This, of course, was in order to maintain a legislative majority completely created by a gerrymandered map that confounded the will of the voters. A gerrymandered legislature is sabotaging a system installed by popular vote specifically to deal with...a gerrymandered legislature. Chief Justice John Roberts clearly has not read nearly enough Joseph Heller.

“Our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering. Nor does our conclusion condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void,” Roberts said in his opinion. “The States, for example, are actively addressing the issue on a number of fronts.”



It is not condoning magical mapmaking. Oh, no. Heaven forfend. It's just saying that citizens have no recourse to the federal courts to solve a curse on democracy that the Court is now allowing to perpetuate itself.

Protesters gather outside the Court to no avail. The Washington Post Getty Images

Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate money, which led to conservative legislative majorities that were insulated from inconvenient voters by Shelby County, and that now can immortalize themselves by drawing up their own maps with which to do so. This has worked to create a charade of self-government to replace the real one that threatened for years to cause themselves and their donors all kinds of trouble. Justice Elena Kagan clearly has seen through the entire plan.

"For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.

"In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction.

"If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government. And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims.

Justice Elena Kagan did not mince words in dissent. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

"Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require — indeed, they do not permit — courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process.

“But yes, the standards used here do allow — as well they should — judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.”

She was just winding up for the big finish, however.

“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”

As for the citizenship question, and as much as they would deny it, the Court plainly took note of the revelations that came late in its deliberations that the late Thomas Hofeller, the Republican Party's gerrymandering wizard, conceived of the citizenship question as a strategy to rig voting districts for Republican candidates. So the Court decided to let the lower-court ban on the question stand, for the moment, anyway, much to the consternation of Justice Clarence Thomas, who can't believe that anyone would question the good faith of this administration* on such a crucial matter.

"It is not difficult for political opponents of executive actions to generate controversy with accusations of pretext, deceit, and illicit motives. Significant policy decisions are regularly criticized as products of partisan influence, interest group pressure, corruption, and animus. Crediting these accusations on evidence as thin as the evidence here could lead judicial review of administrative proceedings to devolve into an endless morass of discovery and policy disputes not contemplated by the Administrative Procedure Act."

Leaping onto the electric Twitter machine, the president* was rather less circumspect.

“I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter...Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen. Only in America!”

In short, the late Thomas Hofeller's citizenship question is shelved for the moment but, for the moment, his grand project of installing Republican legislative majorities, the will of the people be damned, now has the blessing in eternity of the Supreme Court. Another day of jubilee dawns.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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