On today’s BradCast: More disappointing (if not deadly) rulings on voting rights were released on Monday from the U.S. Supreme Court, and callers ring in on the growing outrage of the last few days, thanks to the parent/child separation of Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy at the border.
First up today, two long-awaited rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court on partisan gerrymandering were finally handed down on Monday. In both cases, as our guest today, FairVote’s DAVID DALEY details, the Court decided to essentially punt the cases back down to lower courts.
Daley, author of RATF**KED: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, which details the GOP scheme to implement extreme partisan redistricting following the 2010 census, explains that Wisconsin Republicans will be allowed to keep their wildly unfair state assembly districts for yet another election, and that, in Maryland, where Democrats admit to having gerrymandered a U.S. House district to their own advantage, that gerrymandered district will also stay in place, almost a full decade after being implemented. That, despite lower courts finding those districts to be unlawful and unconstitutional, and other pending cases — such as the federal court which found all of the U.S. House districts in North Carolina to have been unlawfully gerrymandered by Republicans — still on hold and awaiting a hearing at SCOTUS.
“That’s what’s so frustrating and sad about today,” Daley tells me. “They had a buffet of statistical standards and evidence that all pointed in the same direction and that revealed exactly what had happened here, and, instead, they ducked.” He explains the basis on which the Court punted in both cases and how “Republicans have essentially been able to run out the clock to steal, in some ways, the entire decade of power, especially in state legislatures around the country.”
While the “silver lining” on this today is that the Court did not declare, as some had feared, that it was up to legislatures, not courts, to fix the problem that legislatures themselves created, Daley argues that this was a missed opportunity. The Court’s swing-vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has long suggested he’d be open to finding partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional once and for all. But, once again, in both of today’s cases, he ducked. That means — should the 81-year old Justice (or any of the others) leave the Court before another case comes up to offer a definitive ruling — things could become much worse, for generations, if Trump is allowed to appoint a replacement.
Then, as even some Republicans (a precious few) begin to finally turn against the Trump Administration’s grotesque and inhumane new policy which separates children from their parents after they are detained crossing the southern border with Mexico — resulting in thousands of kids being locked away in detention centers in just the past few weeks — how long can Trump continue to falsely blame the Democrats for his own Dept. of Justice’s new “zero tolerance” policy?
Trump and his department chiefs continue to double down on his false claim, despite the growing outrage from Americans after disturbing stories, pictures, and sounds of abuse continue to be reported out of these detention centers around the country, with media finally gaining very limited access to them.
We open the phone lines today to callers on all of those issues, as the chilling rise of Trump’s GOP-approved authoritarianism in the U.S. continues to stun the nation and the world…
Judge sentences Kobach to summer school.
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/...stuck-with-cle
https://www.politico.com/blogs/...t-rules-652867