While the Charlatans Cotillion was underway in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the Supreme Court gave voting rights another smackdown, this time concerning the gerrymandering undertaken in Texas. The new Gorsuch majority performed the way that the Gorsuch majority was designed to behave as soon as it was determined by Mitch McConnell that the Garland majority was something up with which he would not put. From The Texas Tribune:

In separate orders issued Tuesday, the high court blocked two lower court rulings that invalidated parts of Texas' maps where lawmakers were found to have discriminated against voters of color. The justices’ 5-4 decisions stay the rulings — which would have required new maps — as they take up an appeal from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented from the majority opinion.

This, of course, will give the people who drew the old maps exactly what they were aiming for.

In siding with the state, the high court made it more likely that Texas will use its current maps in the upcoming elections. The high court could also choose to delay the March primary elections. Its decision is likely months away.

The fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the conservatives on this one should give pause to those people waiting on the bigger gerrymandering case that the Court will hear at the beginning of October—Gill v.Whitford—that is expected to decide the constitutionality of what is alleged to be purely political gerrymandering in Wisconsin. This issue, of course, was not discussed when Kris Kobach opened his kabuki performance on Tuesday. However, there was a lengthy discussion of Mexican election reforms of 1991.

AP

John Lott, the non-expert expert witness and onetime Internet celebrity, cited those reforms as a template for the “reforms” he’d like to see in this country. This struck me as a little odd since what little I knew about Mexican elections was not promising. So I consulted with the indefatigable Al Giordano, my fellow Boston Phoenix alumnus, founder of the School for Authentic Journalism, and someone who has lived and worked in Mexico for decades. I asked him what the effect of those 1991 reforms was. He texted me back a lengthy reply.

In the 1988 Mexican presidential election Cuahtemoc Cardenas was winning when the election commission computer system famously crashed. When it booted back up Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner. The reforms were a response to that. In 2006 Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the center-left candidate, won but had - I documented exactly how in a New Left Review report - 1.5 million votes stolen to hand the election to Felipe Calderon. So while it is possible the 1991 reforms did some good they clearly did not go far enough to prevent a fraud of massive proportions that involved literally disappearing 1.5 votes that had been cast. Election fraud here is an advanced science…you can't project election results where fraud is so easy. That's the sad reality. This is why you can never have a 538 in Mexico.

So, yeah, almost nobody on that commission knows what they’re talking about. Which, again, was the whole point.

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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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