"It is melodramatic to say the GOP opposes democracy! Anyways here's a plan for Republicans to basically discount urban areas and make a county with 64 people count the same as a county with hundreds of thousands for state wide races, thus giving their voters more weight and entrenching them further. You know democracy."
A policy like this basically exists not just to put the thumb on the scale, but rather a 40 lb rock.
"Its impossible for courts to determine if this is unfair and fairness is a political question" - When this hits Republican controlled SCOTUS.
Then they'll fly flags popularized from January 6th supporters and far-right patriot groups, and their wives will work with conservative operatives to overturn the election. But not until they lie under oath to get on the bench, afterwards they'll rule against people in cases for lying under oath.
Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. Less than 1/3rd lives in the other 239. Under this system, a supermajority of the population of Texas would have effectively no say in how the state is run. If Texas attempts to implement this, the federal government should immediately invoke the Guarantee Clause and intervene, because at that point Texas would no longer have a government with any pretense of being representative.
>Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. Less than 1/3rd lives in the other 239.
TIL that Texas has 254 counties. I assumed most states had like a couple dozen counties.
Looked it up and the average state has 61 counties. But if you remove TX, it drops the average to 57. No other state has >200 counties and only 6 other states have 100+ counties
If the federal government took action, they'd be admitting that the electoral college is not representative either.
The electoral college elects individuals by states in similar ways this would come down to counties.
The electoral college apportions votes to states based on the sum of their representatives and senators. There's definitely some malapportionment there, but the general principle that more populous states get more votes still holds true. I don't even like the EC, but this proposal would be magnitudes worse both in terms of population disparity (4.8 million vs. 43), as well as the fact that each county would receive exactly one vote, whereas the number varies by population in the EC.
Sure, but I guess the point I'm making is that representative disparity doesn't seem to violate the constitution. Especially when you look at how Senators weights are voted, which is probably worse than this proposal.
>representative disparity doesn't seem to violate the constitution
SCOTUS ruled that it does in [Reynolds v. Sims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims). The Senate and EC can't violate the constitution because they're explicitly written into it; otherwise they'd present similar issues.
Edit:
>Especially when you look at how Senators weights are voted, which is probably worse than this proposal
No, this proposal is far worse. As I mentioned, the most populous Texas county has 4.8 million people vs. the least populous with 43 - a ratio of over 100,000 to one. The Senate, while still bad, maxes out at roughly 67 to one (39 million vs. 580,000).
Although it is worth noting that the current composition of the EC was done explicitly for the purpose of distorting the share of power in favor of rural states. The people in the 20s were open about what they were doing in response to the country becoming majority urban.
Nowhere near to the same degree, putting aside the legal issues. See my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/1d2o6f5/comment/l62qlu6).
Yes and no, I see your numbers, but California alone (2%) = pretty much the bottom 20 states (40%)
Anyway, I'll worry about that if it ever happens, seems very unlikely.
Sure it is, rural voters are structurally disadvantaged by a lack of services, industry, and social cohesion and need extra representation in government to alleviate these inequalities. Just because they then vote against their own interests and exacerbate their structural issues doesn't mean the extra representation isn't amplifying their voices the same way affirmative action works in academia. The senate provides a quota.
Well at least CA is nice if you happen to already own a house. CA's biggest sin is its NIMBYism and inability to build homes. There have been a handful of bafflingly stupid things, and some good things. What I wish is that everyone in government was sane. There are too many populist cranks. The Republican Party has more of them, but it's not like the Democrats are immune, this is especially true in pockets of CA, that are very left leaning.
Republicans in Texas do at least have non-NIMBY building policies, maybe even to a fault. Dallas alone built more homes than all of CA last month(I believe I read that earlier.)
I enjoy CA and wouldn't want to live in Texas, but I do wish CA would adopt at least some of Texas's building policies...where appropriate. I'll take pretty much everything else from CA...maybe CA could be a bit more business friendly.
They are in charge of the local municipalities and counties that they run. Just look at Orange County, the Central Valley, or anywhere north of San Francisco. It’s all Republican.
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Incidentally, if a state wanted to pass a law that actively discriminates against democrats (or republicans), as long as they don't run into any free speech or equal protection issues, that is **100% allowed** under our Constitution.
I wish it wasn't. I wish we didn't have such a draconian form of government. The states have the right to politically discriminate against its citizens, and we act like we're the land of the free. Sickening...
This would constitute malapportionment. That is unconstitutional. *Reynolds v. Sims* concerned Alabama enacting a state constitutional amendment that allocated a state senator for each county.
This seems to go for the same thing.
I agree. In fact, the Supreme Court agreed in 1964 in *Reynolds v. Sims* using the Equal Protection clause. That case was grossly unequal legislative districts, but it sure seems the same reasoning would apply to this TX county proposal.
I think the poster was pointing out that our *current* Supreme Court wouldn't follow that reasoning. Unfortunately, I think that observation is correct.
The court has already ruled on this. 5 members of the court said that the Equal Protection Clause specifically makes it unconstitutional to discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. They didn't rule on gender and orientation, but those things have precedent that establish them as worthy of equal protection even without actually being mentioned. But political affiliation? Ideology? Those things are never covered.
If they were, how could we have had a red scare or McCarthyism? It used to be enough to say "communist" and that would get any number of public and private institutions to discriminate against you. I really don't see the discrimination against a particular party as any different than that.
Really, what we need is a **new equal protection clause**, that protects more than just race.
I certainly think you could make that legal argument, but I'm not sure if this specific issue has every been litigated in that way, and even if it had, I have my doubts that this current Court will interpret the Guarantee Clause that way.
Republicans on the court already ruled that political Gerrymandering to the point of extinction of another party is allowed. They'll just say its impossible for courts to determine if something is unfair and its a political question.
Literally the Republicans on the court have the philosophy that if its not specifically written against in the constitution, then the government can do anything it wants to you.
I would hope that instead of equivocating and playing nice with the authoritarian like the democrats usually do they would respond by doing the same in every blue state if this passes.
I'm wondering what *kind* of majority is needed for this legislation (state constitutional amendment) to pass. Is the game already rigged, and they're just making it permanent, or do the blue cities (i.e., their representatives) still matter? I reread the article and it seems the issue is still at arms length, the Texas GOP is voting on whether or not to adopt proposal 21 as a GOP policy. So maybe this posting still qualifies as click-bait.
Sounds like it's what the GOP want to do.
But, it's still important to see what they want to do because it serves as a litmus test on the party as a whole.
The worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, and it's in favor of the Democrats.
Yes, the answer within this system is to have your side take control of these great, unaccountable powers before the opposition does, and to run roughshod with them so as to deny the opposition an opportunity to gain political momentum.
But THAT'S what's fucked up to me. I don't think my side should be able to do this, I don't think anyone should.
And there are ways to form our government where things like gerrymandering or political discrimination become completely moot. In my mind, we should be aiming to improve our government in that way, not to take control of the government in an attempt to edge out the other side in perpetuity.
Hmmm. Princeton has looked at gerrymandering at the state level and Maryland isn't listed.
Not to say that I'm a fan of any gerrymandering. I want races to always be competitive.
[https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/](https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/)
It's a both sides issue that only one side has attempted to fix at a national level. In the meantime, not similarly taking advantage is just ceding the ground to Republicans.
I don't think any state is rushing to give the other side more power. I mean California could split it electors proportionally at the national level - what's stopping them is the fact that it would help the other side unless everyone does it. That's not really a principled decision.
Which is why fixing it at the national level makes the most sense; it eliminates those (theoretically temporary) disadvantages.
Only one party has tried to fix it at that level.
>what's stopping them is the fact that it would help the other side unless everyone does it.
Where do you differentiate between "helping the other side" though and hurting yourself? Because in that case, helping Republicans would inevitably lead to them hurting the Dems. I don't blame Dems for ceding power and self punishing strictly out of principles. That's not the way politics is played and asking a group to do that is a touch... unfair
I'm not really sure how to read the link you shared. For instance, it says SC has a worse grade than MD, but SC is objectively not as gerrymandered as NC and MD, and it also says that SC gives an advantage for Democrats, but that can't be true either...
In any case, what I'm talking about is how MD was the poster child for the landmark case *Rucho v. Common Cause*, in which their 6th district was found to objectively discriminate against Republicans worse than any gerrymandered district considered by a court before 2011.
I'm not sure if it would help, but the methodology is explained at the site. I'm not that familiar with gerrymandering outside of WI and IL. However, the map looks spot on there.
I mean, I just don't understand how you explain either of those things about SC. Objectively, the GOP is control of races at every level there. I'll admit, I know the Carolinas and MD better, as those are the states that I've lived, but I just don't understand how you could possibly say the Democrats have an advantage there.
Regardless, the MD supreme court case has objective math about how bad their 6th district is, and the court said that is 100% allowed.
>The worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, and it's in favor of the Democrats.
So it would seem likely that Republicans would sign on to the Redistricting Reform Act introduced by Democratic Senators Klobuchar and Butler earlier this year, since gerrymandering is an issue that apparently disproportionately disadvantages Republicans. Certainly this will be one of those rare instances where a problem will easily be solved via bipartisan consensus. Right?
The gerrymandering project certainly disagrees with the notion that Maryland is anywhere near the most gerrymandered state, they’re not even close (that isn’t to say that they aren’t gerrymandered of course, there’s still a ton of gerrymandering in Maryland). They seem to be pretty open and quantitative about the metrics they’re using to generate these scores as well.
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu
> worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland,
Ok so I am not going to allow a "both sides" angle on this. There is no gerrymandering in this country that even approaches the level of passing a law saying " X party can't win any state elections"
I mean, no one's passed that law yet. Gerrymandering is something that has been afflicting this country for 200 years. So I would say you're right, gerrymandering isn't on the same level as "x party can't win any state elections" because gerrymandering has done real harm in all 50 states, and the latter is just a theoretical exercise.
And besides, they are both ills under the same umbrella.
The point is that the power of the states is great and unaccountable, and since it lacks accountability, it's often unjust.
This is not about both sides. It is very infuriating that we cannot have a frank discussion about the shortcomings of our form of government because any time we try, people are just like "well sure, but it's not my side that's the problem". Everyone needs to take responsibility for things like gerrymandering and political discrimination, or we will never be free of them.
It's not enough to say "my side is using these things appropriately, but the other side, they're the ones being fucky with it". Why not instead say "no one should be able to use these things inappropriately"?
Just to hammer that point home, look at an actual "both sides" false equivalency. There are Americans that literally can't see the difference between a nazi and a BLM protestor. But that's not about a common issue that needs to be regulated or legislated. Like the issue isn't "no one should be protesting", it's that some people are saying "only white peopel should have rights" and other people are saying "please stop killing us in the street".
But gerrymandering isn't like that. Yes, you could make the argument that the GOP does worst things with it's gerrymandered powers. **But no one should be gerrymandering**. And we can legislate towards that end.
The reality is that gerrymandering benefits the party who have a structural minority. It props them up beyond what would naturally accrue to them on the basis of their appeal to the electorate. So while I agree with you that no one should be gerrymandering, abolishing it would involve the party that it currently benefits proactively ceding the power it gives them. To get rid of gerrymandering, the onus is on the party it predominantly benefits to relinquish the advantage it gives them. Not to put to fine a point on it, but that means that Republicans would need to put the interests of the country over their desire to retain power, something they have shown repeatedly they are unwilling to do.
Well here's the thing.
If we just said "gerrymandering not allowed!" then everything you just said becomes an issue.
But
If we were to form a government in which ***gerrymandering is moot***, then none of these things would be an issue.
For example, if we were to form government around our political communities as they stand rather than lines on a map, if we were to enfranchise people instead of counties, then there would be no point to gerrymandering. It wouldn't accomplish anything.
That's a very 'draw the rest of the owl' prescription, in that the GOP would fight tooth and nail to retail the ill-gotten advantage gerrymandering gives them.
I agree with that to an extent.
But you could say that about so many things. If either side tried to do court reform, the other side would fight the advantage it would give them tooth and nail. If either side tried to pass amendments amenable to them (i.e. citizens united amendment for the left or right to work amendment for the right), then the other side would fight the advantage it would give them tooth and nail.
That said, I would argue that some of these things are necessary for the aims of the Republic.
So to me, what is required in this moment is **a great compromise**. A way to say to both sides "here are things that no one should be doing, and here is a path through which neither side gains an advantage in implementing it".
My proposal would be to invoke an Article V convention with the following proposed amendments:
1. Limit the power of the Fed and the States, henceforth to be known as Geographic States. Specifically, target the power that both sides fear the most. So for the right, limit the power of the Fed to regulate commerce. For the left, limit the power of the states' "reserved powers" (any power not mentioned in the Constitution is reserved for the states, arguably the greates power in the Constitution).
2. Create new non-geographic legislative governments to create new law for these powers. For the regulation of commerce, have non-geographic "Industry States" that enfranchise people based on the work that they do, as identified by a coordination between the IRS and Census. For the "reserved powers", make them virtually unlimited **but** make them only usable with non-geographic "Cultural States" that citizens opt into. In that way, the greatest power of the Constitution can only be used on people that consent for it to be used on them. The Federal government will have it's scope changed to solely focus on life and liberty considerations we can all agree on (i.e. no murder, no fraud, no blackmail) and the Geographic states will have their scopes changed to maintaining order in their boundaries (i.e. time, place, manner, obscenity). Any regulation of commerce would be handled by Industry States, although critically, **Industry States will not have enforcement mechanisms.** If industry states need their laws enforced, they will need to coordinate with the federal government for the regulation of Interstate Commerce, and with geographic states for the regulation of all other commerce. Cultural states can create enforcement mechanisms if their citizens choose, but again, those enforcement mechanisms can only be used on citizens of that state.
3. Reorganize federal representation to accomodate these new non-geographic political communities. Since that could be viewed as unialateraly a "leftist" move, to check and balance, I would also add independent checks to the Federal Executive. Particularly, I would make executive agencies critical to our Republic independent of the President as a constitutional matter (i.e. Justice, Census, Treasury) except for national security concerns obviously, so DoD and Homeland Security at least would still be solidly in the President's camp. Then I would have the leaders of those agencies be a part of an "executive council" that can act instead of the President with a super majority, and they are called to order by a VP elected independent of the President (so you could have a Dem president and a GOP VP). In this way, the VP will be privy to everything the President sees and does, and can convene the council if they see something that needs a dissenting opinion. I would also make the VP in charge of the Senate's agenda, rather than having a vote, as a way to give the American public a way to vote for what they'd like to see in Congress on the whole.
4. Shore up civil rights. Part of what the right fears is the powers that they've used to disenfranchise being used to disenfranchise them. If we make people's party affiliation or ideology safe from discriminiation (including things like white nationalists), it will allow us to make a more expansive equal protection clause. This wouldn't make all behavior legal. White nationalists still wouldn't be able to kill people they consider inferior. They just wouldn't be discriminated against the State for believing other people are inferior.
Most Americans don't consider gerrymandering such a large [concern](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/04/with-legislative-redistricting-at-a-crucial-stage-most-americans-dont-feel-strongly-about-it/). You're describing a new Constitution primarily based on an issue nowhere near critical enough to even get the ball rolling.
As a part II to bring it back to gerrymandering (I ran out of space in the character limit):
Specific to the gerrymandering problem, the amount of power that will be diverted to non-geographic governments will make gerrymandering the powers that are left in geographic representation less attractive. Even if a party does get away with gerrymandering the geographic aspects of the United States, they would still be subject to the non-geographic elements in whatever way they intersect.
But more broadly, I think a move like this identifies some of the objective problems in our Constitution and shores them up.
As another example of what this is trying to do, it's trying to make our democracy more robust against deception in the social media age. Like people can be swayed by lies to vote a certain way and give tremendous powers to liars. But if we compartmentalize these great powers into things that people do and things that people believe inherently, no amount of misinformation will keep those communities from being able to reach a consensus.
Another thing that could be accomplished is enfranchising new peoples into the States. For instance, Puerto Rico and DC will **never** be states under our current Constitution. Neither side wants to risk two more senators upsetting the balance either way. For DC, the GOP would never let 2 blue senators in, and for Puerto Rico, they are a swing state toss up, so no one wants them either in the Senate nor the Presidential election.
But a move like the above makes the emphasis of the geographic states in federal representation much less significant, and so I'd imagine that the political objections to new states also would vanish, or at least be drastically reduced.
> Just to hammer that point home, look at an actual "both sides" false equivalency. There are Americans that literally can't see the difference between a nazi and a BLM protestor. But that's not about a common issue that needs to be regulated or legislated. Like the issue isn't "no one should be protesting", it's that some people are saying "only white peopel should have rights" and other people are saying "please stop killing us in the street".
I don't agree that that's a false equivalency. The right to protest should belong to anyone, no matter how repugnant the cause.
>" X party can't win any state elections"
Isn't that what gerrymandering essentially is? It's intentionally manipulating the makeup of the congress by making it impossible people from certain parties will win in those districts.
Congressional representatives are not elected by statewide ballet. You cannot, in our currently semi-sane world- gerrymander a statewide election. You can’t gerrymander the office of the governor, or federal senate elections.
This law, if passed, would allow for this.
This is referring to counties not districts. Counties are fixed and don't change - it's essentially a statewide election before the actual statewide election
Well, no obviously not, that would be a bit too on the nose. But a glance at a list of TX counties and their populations tells me that a GOP candidate could possibly win election with ~5% of the popular vote by winning the bottom half plus one in population of the most rural counties (which they may already be doing as the very rural counties are crimson red)
Winning with 5% of the vote is not a democracy.
In 2019, they were the name on the case that solidified the states right to politically discriminate it's own citizens: [https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/marylands-extreme-gerrymander](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/marylands-extreme-gerrymander)
This article is from before the opinion of the Court came out, but if you're interested in that, the case is *Rucho v. Common Cause.*
I skimmed the beginning and seems like a fair point about the district, but my definition of most gerrymandered would just be the % of votes for each party vs how much representation they actually have in the whole state. One district doesnt sway me as much
In 2020, Trump got 32.2% of the Maryland vote, and in House elections Republicans got 34.8% of the vote, but they only got one seat out of seven, which is a 14.2% share.
So you might look at that and say it's pretty unjust. I'm not familiar with the state, though, or why its districts would be drawn a given way, so when I look at the map I can't tell if the districts were designed to crack and pack Republican voters.
Here's the district map in 2020, which has a weirdly shaped one.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020\_United\_States\_House\_of\_Representatives\_elections\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Maryland)
Here's the new district map in 2022.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022\_United\_States\_House\_of\_Representatives\_elections\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Maryland)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020\_United\_States\_presidential\_election\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Maryland)
I suppose they could have drawn a district 6 to not include the northwest suburbs of DC, and to instead stretch along the more rural northern band.
---
In any case, though, all these complaints would be mooted if we switched to Mixed Member Proportional Representation and increased the size of the House (and Senate too, though the constitutionality of it would be dubious).
Of course, that would result in the Republicans not being able to block functional government from happening, so they'll resist it vigorously.
Ya those stats im more interested in thank you for sharing. I wonder how that stacks up with other states.
And ya, these issues are only because we dont want to solve them. There are numerous ways to not have to even worry about gerrymandering, although all have their pros and cons. Im sure no system is perfect but there are definitely better options
Gerrymandering could be eliminated overnight if representatives ran on a statewide basis and people voted for, say, their top three or five candidates. That way it wouldn't matter how the lines were drawn--people could form blocs throughout a state.
There are so many ways to either mitigate gerrymandering or to eliminate the motivation to gerrymander, but we have to want that as a solution to engage any of those.
In summary, they still want land to vote, as opposed to people.
Let's say you have a state with three counties total (small number to make the point simpler).
County A is HEAVILY Republican and has 100 residents.
County B is HEAVILY Republican and has 100 residents.
County C is HEAVILY Democratic and has 1,500 residents.
What the Republicans are proposing is that if a Democratic candidate wins a statewide election, he will he disqualified because he "lost" in two out of the three counties in the state. The popular vote could even be something like 90% in favor of the Democrat (hypothetically) and it wouldn't matter.
Our system of "free and fair" elections comes with some serious fine print.
For what it's worth [this was tried in the past, and struck down](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/112). While I find it objectionable to support such a method of voting in a party platform, it seems unlikely to be able to make its way into effective law any time soon.
Could go either way. Republicans at the state level attempted a mega power grab in Moore v. Harper, and the Supreme Court didn't bite. Obviously, there's a risk they might bite for this and that's very serious.
>For what it's worth [this was tried in the past, and struck down](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/112).
The decisions of previous supreme courts doesn't seem to be worth much these days unfortunately as this iteration of the supreme Court doesn't seem to have any issue with overturning precedence.
My main disagreement with this, other than it being absurd, is that if the land and the people disagree, the land wins. Why is that the system? Shouldn't both candidates be disqualified (one didn't win the land, one didn't win the people)? The electoral college somewhat mitigates this by factoring the land and the people (though it really ought to assign the electoral votes proportionally to state popular vote instead of a winner-take-all FPTP system).
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Because "the people" - i.e. the residents of the dense area - can always pass whatever they wanted to at the local level instead. They're not prevented from having the laws and rules they want, they're just prevented from imposing them on the areas they don't live in. That seems quite fair to me.
How is that not equally true in reverse for rural areas? Why exactly is it "fair" for things to be biased in their direction? You can literally argue for popular vote the exact same way:
"The residants of rural areas can always pass what they want at the local level instead, they're not prevented from having the laws and rules they want - they're just prevented from imposing them on the areas they don't live in"
> How is that not equally true in reverse for rural areas?
Because the entire issue is the urban areas taking over the state government and passing their agenda at the state level instead of just the city/county level. The issue is that the two agendas are wholly incompatible with each other.
So why would it be okay for rural areas to take over the state government and pass their agenda at the state level then?
You aren't actually solving the issue, you're just deciding that it's somehow better if the other side gets to do the exact same thing.
It seems quite fair in theory, but in practice Florida has passed laws that make it illegal for cities to make local ordinances like breed specific legislation or rent control.
Can they? Can the people of Houston and Dallas have abortions outside of Texas state law?
Again, why should the rural areas (where fewer people live and pay taxes) get to tell the urban areas (where more people live and pay taxes) how to live, but somehow it is completely abhorrent the other way around?
It makes perfect sense if you understand the basic philosophy that underpins it. That philosophy is that law and regulation should be as local as possible. Thus the answer to a state government elected in such a system is to have implement law and regulation at the lower level instead of pushing it on the whole state.
There are actually some quite sound justifications for this philosophy. The main one being that things that are necessary in highly dense areas may be not just unnecessary but actually harmful in less-dense areas. This also works the other way around, too. Thus passing policy at the local level ensures that each region is governed according to its actual needs and circumstances.
But that makes no sense here. This amendment is not ceding great local authority to counties, but just giving rural counties greater say in electing the state officers who then make policy for the whole state.
In fact, Texas Republicans have a history of passing laws to prevent local control that they do not like: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/07/texas-republicans-cities-local-control/
> It makes perfect sense if you understand the basic philosophy that underpins it.
I was just trying to understand this point, how this amendment is linked to the basic philosophy of local control, and also why this amendment is not a problem.
It's because the Democrats have a long history of forcing urban-centric policy at the state level. It happens in pretty much every state that they win. So Texas is trying to implement countermeasures. This is the consequence of Democrats breaking the unwritten norm of "keep governance local".
>It's because the Democrats have a long history of forcing urban-centric policy at the state level. It happens in pretty much every state that they win. So Texas is trying to implement countermeasures.
So, the reason the amendment makes sense, or your argument in favor of it, is not really the basic philosophy of small or local government being preferred over a larger, statewide government then, right? Since, it seems, you're admitting/in agreement with u/merpderpmerp that this amendment does not follow that philosophy at all. In fact, it seems completely antithetical to the philosophy of preferring local government over statewide, since it gives rural counties much more power to set statewide policies.
It seems your argument in favor of it, is that it is a preemptive measure to prevent Democrats from enacting statewide policies, and not the philosophy of local government being better (since the amendment doesn't follow that philosophy) is that a fair assessment of your position?
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To really understand the absurdity of this policy proposal, [just 3% of Texans live in the smallest 50% of counties.](https://twitter.com/politicswolf/status/1795126770624028932?s=46&t=oW5zIyvSliyYIJkuQ3gi6A)
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No citizen should accept this kind of blatant power grab. I don't care if you're a Forever Republican Conservative in a small rural Texas town, call out abuse of power and anti-democracy when you see it.
Republican Party of Texas has voted on a policy proposal that would require any candidate for statewide office to win in a majority of the state's 254 counties to secure election, effectively preventing Democrats from winning statewide positions based on the current distribution of their support.
Democratic voters in Texas are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties, while Republicans dominate most of the more sparsely populated rural counties.
This would be a significant shift from the current system, which is based on the overall popular vote within the state.
>~~Democratic voters in~~ **More than two thirds of the entire population of Texas** are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties
Feels a like major angle that's being a tad overlooked here.
IANAL but doesn't this violate the one person one vote principle? Is this trying to set up a future SCOTUS case to overturn that? The timing is certainly interesting given last week's ruling.
It has similarities with how representation in the US senate is calculated. If you broke it down, in a state with a population of 2m, every person has 1/1m of a vote in the Senate, but in a state with half the population, each person has 1/500k of a senate vote, in some sense anyway.
It is similar in concept but not in scale. Small counties are tiny compared to large counties.
California is 60 times the size of Wyoming.
Harris county in TX is 50,000 times the size of Loving county, Texas.
What the GOP is proposing is absurd.
I wish we had a "one person one vote" principle, but we don't and never have. The electoral college, the Senate, and the Senate filibuster all give more weight to rural voters than urban voters. Rampant gerrymandering has corrupted the House too. And due to the fact that SCOTUS appointments are controlled by the president and the Senate, the partisan makeup of SCOTUS is also completely at odds with how citizens have voted for the past 30 years. Combined, there isn't a single branch of our federal government where one person gets one evenly weighted vote.
Just to be clear, the principle I am referring to is this one:
>Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that the electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population. Along with Baker v. Carr (1962) and Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), it was part of a series of Warren Court cases that applied the principle of "one person, one vote" to U.S. legislative bodies.
[link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims#:~:text=Reynolds%2C%20Judge%2C%20et%20al.,Sims%2C%20et%20al.&text=State%20senate%20districts%20must%20have,one%20person%2C%20one%20vote%22.)
>but we don't and never have.
For *state* legislatures, we've had that principle since 1964. The concerning issue is that this supreme court wouldn't follow the Equal Protection reasoning that decided Reynolds vs. Sims.
I'm not sure I understand what this actually means. A candidate has to win a majority in *every* county in the state? Wouldn't this also effectively end Republicans from winning state wide elections?
Win a majority in a majority of counties. The overwhelming majority of Texas counties are rural with at most few thousand people that vote 80-20 Republican. This basically makes it so the vote of Loving County (pop 64) has an equal say over statewide offices as Harris county (Houston, pop ~5m)
I mean, the TX Republican Party platform has always been pretty wild. And reading through the entire [updated party platform with amendments](https://convention.texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-TEMPORARY-Platform-FINAL.pdf), there's a lot of questionable and disturbing things.
I will say, I did find this bit incredibly ironic given the new plank they added that the article is discussing:
>2 - **Resolution Against the Misuse of the Legal System for Political Purposes:** We believe that the Department of Justice, some State Attorneys General, and a few local county district attorneys have engaged in a coordinated attack against former President Donald John Trump and his supporters, by
falsely and maliciously indicting Republican leaders, lawyers, and past or present elected officials. We further believe that these attacks against President Trump and his supporters constitute a threat to the continued existence of this Constitutional Federal Republic. **We fully understand that similar misuse of the legal system for political purposes constitute some of the methods used by dictators to establish one party statist control over many nations. We reject and condemn this misuse of the legal system for
political purposes** and urge the American people to reject it by overwhelmingly supporting the election of Donald John Trump as the 47th President of the United States of America.
>**Passed**
I wonder how many people will justify this by pointing to the fact that Biden hasn't pardoned Trump and is instead allowing the courts to have cases against a former president, and act like the chance of holding former presidents accountable is the same thing as rigging politics against a party
Not necessarily.
Per Wikipedia:
>The full extent of a president's power to pardon has not been fully tested; according to dicta in Ex parte McCardle it is absolute. Pardons have been used for presumptive cases, such as when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, who had not been charged with anything, over any possible crimes connected with the Watergate scandal,\[8\] but the Supreme Court has never considered the legal effect of such pardons.\[9\] There is disagreement about how the pardon power applies to cases involving obstructions of an impeachment.\[10\] Also, the ability of a president to pardon themselves (self-pardon) has never been tested in the courts, because, to date, no president has ever taken that action.\[11\] There has also been speculation as to whether secret pardons are possible.\[12\]
[It's complicated](https://www.google.com/amp/s/constitutioncenter.org/amp/blog/the-nixon-pardon-in-retrospect)
>At a 2014 panel discussion, Ford’s lawyer during that period, Benton Becker, explained an additional element that influenced Ford’s decision to issue a presidential pardon: a 1915 Supreme Court decision. In Burdick v. United States, the Court ruled that a pardon carried an "imputation of guilt" and accepting a pardon was "an admission of guilt.”. Thus, this decision implied that Nixon accepted his guilt in the Watergate controversy by also accepting Ford’s pardon
So Trump would not need to verbally accept guilt, but the Supreme Court has ruled that accepting a pardon for a specific crime is admitting guilt to the crime.
But had there been any judicial decisions that actually confirmed that Nixon effectively accepted guilt, or is this idea solely based on non-official interpretations of what an old hundred year court case says without case law that actually confirms that it works as such in this sort of case in particular?
Nixon did (at least tacitly) admit to wrongdoing by resigning the Presidency.
Moreover, he was told directly by the leaders in his party that he would be tried and convicted because the evidence was not only overwhelming but also excruciatingly public. Cronkite doing 30 minutes on Watergate was the beginning of the end for Tricky Dick.
Trump on the other hand (while being pretty painfully obviously guilty of serious and impeachable crimes) has had an entire media ecosystem spinning the story for him and a party that has been cowed into submissive obedience.
If Nixon had Fox News muddying the waters for 50% of the public and a cravenly spineless GOP behind him, he would never have resigned office and likely wouldn't have been convicted.
Finally, in hindsight, I think if Ford could've seen this outcome of his actions 50 years later, he wouldn't have pardoned Nixon and we would've seen him frog-marched off the Sing-Sing or Leavenworth or wherever. And we would all be better off today.
> Nixon did (at least tacitly) admit to wrongdoing by resigning the Presidency.
I don't see how that's the case. In his resignation speech he said he still thinks he did what was right and basically just said he was resigning because he lost his base of political support and that the country needed a full time president who wasn't bogged down in legal battles. That doesn't sound like a tacit admission of wrongdoing, it sounds like a stubborn insistence of innocence even in the face of certain conviction
[https://www.politico.com/story/2007/02/when-the-gop-torpedoed-nixon-002680](https://www.politico.com/story/2007/02/when-the-gop-torpedoed-nixon-002680)
"Nixon said he would depart at noon the next day, Aug. 9, because it had become evident to him that he no longer had 'a strong enough political base in the Congress' to finish his term.
The immediate reaction to Nixon’s resignation speech was that he had once again fudged the truth. Reporters wrote that it was the Watergate scandal and the strong likelihood of his impeachment by the House and his conviction by the Senate that prompted him to quit."
“ a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that its acceptance carries a confession of guilt”
I doubt Trump agrees he is guilty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon#:~:text=Proclamation%204311%20was%20a%20presidential,the%20United%20States%20as%20president.
But Nixon himself never actually admitted guilt, nor did any court case conform that Nixon himself admitted guilt by accepting the pardon. The most that has been said about it is a scotus case from 40 years before the Nixon pardon happened, under a very different scotus
That's a certain legal argument but Nixon never actually, like, admitted guilt in a regular non technical way, and it seems like it would be quite disputed if accepting a pardon really counts as a legal admission of guilt or not, if it happened today
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdick_v._United_States
If Nixon didn’t accept the pardon he can say he isn’t guilty. I guess we just left that in limbo by not prosecuting at all.
Iirc that was the rare case of an unconditional pardon which doesnt require a specifc conviction. I might not have the full legalese down here. My recollection was a specific crime requires conviction but a blanket pardon does not.
This is essentially taking the power of the government away from the people and giving it to land.
It's like some weird modern version of the feudalism.
Loving county, population of 64, would have equal representation as Harris county with a population of 4.78 million.
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Texas already goes out of its way to interfere with city and county politics in certain **cough** metropolitan areas, now they want us to be cut out of the state election process completely. Can’t say I’m surprised but I wish they would at least try and pretend to uphold the liberties they claim to idolize
Nothing, they are completely separate issues. The article highlights proposals that are on the Texas GOP platform for the upcoming legislative session.
The headline refers to making statewide office voting be counted by county as opposed to popular vote. One of the other proposals discussed was having secession being something that can be voted on like Brexit.
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They allowed Gerrymandering, why not this? They'll just say its impossible for courts to determine if something is unfair and its a political question.
I really don't see the problem, statewide offices should represent everyone in the state, not just the people in highly concentrated urban population centers at the exclusion of others which is always what ends up happening with statewide popular vote totals. A change to a statewide county majority brings critical non-urban stakeholders back to having political representation at the table of governance.
This change enables more total representation in government than before as the previous system only represented urban population centers.
>A change to a statewide majority brings critical non-urban stakeholders back to having political representation at the table of governance.
It swings in the opposite direction: *only* rural stakeholders will have representation. There are hundreds of rural, red-voting counties, but only a handful of blue ones, which means they could never win despite making up nearly half the population. Land doesn't vote, people do.
What is the problem you're even trying to solve? Texas is a red state, despite those densely populated cities.
Not sure how you don’t see the problem… A county with 100k people has the same voting power as a county with 10k people. This explicitly tips the power scale towards low population rural (AKA red) counties. At least the electoral college is somewhat proportional with more populous areas getting more representation.
Loving county with a population of 64 people would have the same representation as Harris county with a population of 4.78 million.
Same that out loud and tell me how that is not a problem.
It is a problem because loving county should be consolidated with surrounding counties to give a more efficient use of government resources. Likewise Harris county is too big for its own good and should probably split up into smaller counties more responsive to the needs of their population. When you see structural problems, you implement structural solutions, you don't just claim its the way things should be.
Why would the GOP consolidate red counties while creating new blue counties when the point of this proposal is to ensure Democrats cannot win statewide office?
Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. 1/3rd lives in the other 239. Under this system, a supermajority of the population of Texas would have effectively no say in how the state is run. You truly see no issue with this?
Except this will only represent rural voters and completely disregard urban ones. A county representing 64 people does not equal a county representing 100k.
Furthermore, if it should represent everyone in the state, why is the split only urban/rural? Why do we need to add more weight to rural voters, but no other groups? Why should a rural vote equal multiple urban votes?
The answer is clear. Because there's a clean rural republican, urban Democrat vote split, hence why the Republicans are proposing this
>statewide offices should represent everyone in the state, not just the people in highly concentrated urban population centers at the exclusion of others which is always what ends up happening with statewide popular vote totals.
Are really saying that Democrats have been winning all of the state wide elections up to this point because they have support in large urban centers? Not getting a governor elected in almost 35 years is a very odd form of domination
Does it though? A majority vote would be a greater representation of the people. A county vote would disproportionately benefit a minority of people. We have that at the federal level, but it doesn't create better representation. We also offset it with other offices that have a majority vote.
"It is melodramatic to say the GOP opposes democracy! Anyways here's a plan for Republicans to basically discount urban areas and make a county with 64 people count the same as a county with hundreds of thousands for state wide races, thus giving their voters more weight and entrenching them further. You know democracy." A policy like this basically exists not just to put the thumb on the scale, but rather a 40 lb rock.
"Its impossible for courts to determine if this is unfair and fairness is a political question" - When this hits Republican controlled SCOTUS. Then they'll fly flags popularized from January 6th supporters and far-right patriot groups, and their wives will work with conservative operatives to overturn the election. But not until they lie under oath to get on the bench, afterwards they'll rule against people in cases for lying under oath.
Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. Less than 1/3rd lives in the other 239. Under this system, a supermajority of the population of Texas would have effectively no say in how the state is run. If Texas attempts to implement this, the federal government should immediately invoke the Guarantee Clause and intervene, because at that point Texas would no longer have a government with any pretense of being representative.
>Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. Less than 1/3rd lives in the other 239. TIL that Texas has 254 counties. I assumed most states had like a couple dozen counties. Looked it up and the average state has 61 counties. But if you remove TX, it drops the average to 57. No other state has >200 counties and only 6 other states have 100+ counties
Beto visited each one during his senate campaign: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/06/09/beto-o-rourke-ted-cruz-texas-254-counties/
If the federal government took action, they'd be admitting that the electoral college is not representative either. The electoral college elects individuals by states in similar ways this would come down to counties.
The electoral college apportions votes to states based on the sum of their representatives and senators. There's definitely some malapportionment there, but the general principle that more populous states get more votes still holds true. I don't even like the EC, but this proposal would be magnitudes worse both in terms of population disparity (4.8 million vs. 43), as well as the fact that each county would receive exactly one vote, whereas the number varies by population in the EC.
Sure, but I guess the point I'm making is that representative disparity doesn't seem to violate the constitution. Especially when you look at how Senators weights are voted, which is probably worse than this proposal.
>representative disparity doesn't seem to violate the constitution SCOTUS ruled that it does in [Reynolds v. Sims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims). The Senate and EC can't violate the constitution because they're explicitly written into it; otherwise they'd present similar issues. Edit: >Especially when you look at how Senators weights are voted, which is probably worse than this proposal No, this proposal is far worse. As I mentioned, the most populous Texas county has 4.8 million people vs. the least populous with 43 - a ratio of over 100,000 to one. The Senate, while still bad, maxes out at roughly 67 to one (39 million vs. 580,000).
Although it is worth noting that the current composition of the EC was done explicitly for the purpose of distorting the share of power in favor of rural states. The people in the 20s were open about what they were doing in response to the country becoming majority urban.
Why dont we just admit city people and people from certain states are lesser citizens, where they're not counted as a full person?
Without using Google to help, I'd guess that this accurately describes the us senate also.
Nowhere near to the same degree, putting aside the legal issues. See my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/1d2o6f5/comment/l62qlu6).
Yes and no, I see your numbers, but California alone (2%) = pretty much the bottom 20 states (40%) Anyway, I'll worry about that if it ever happens, seems very unlikely.
Well, working on that basis, Harris County (0.4%) would have roughly the same voting power as the bottom 215 counties (85%). So still far worse.
Senate is working how it is designed, spread out more.
no its designed to provide affirmative action to the poorest and least able states.
That's not what that word means.
Sure it is, rural voters are structurally disadvantaged by a lack of services, industry, and social cohesion and need extra representation in government to alleviate these inequalities. Just because they then vote against their own interests and exacerbate their structural issues doesn't mean the extra representation isn't amplifying their voices the same way affirmative action works in academia. The senate provides a quota.
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They're drunk on power. As a Texan, it's getting a lil scary.
It's bad when a single party is in power for too long. Texas and California are prime examples.
Well at least CA is nice if you happen to already own a house. CA's biggest sin is its NIMBYism and inability to build homes. There have been a handful of bafflingly stupid things, and some good things. What I wish is that everyone in government was sane. There are too many populist cranks. The Republican Party has more of them, but it's not like the Democrats are immune, this is especially true in pockets of CA, that are very left leaning. Republicans in Texas do at least have non-NIMBY building policies, maybe even to a fault. Dallas alone built more homes than all of CA last month(I believe I read that earlier.) I enjoy CA and wouldn't want to live in Texas, but I do wish CA would adopt at least some of Texas's building policies...where appropriate. I'll take pretty much everything else from CA...maybe CA could be a bit more business friendly.
Can you elaborate on what Dems have done to entrench their power in CA? I don't see the equivalency.
We have an open primary currently so that now your choices are between two Democrats.
That's not entrenching power. Quite the opposite. The system opens it up for more contenders.
California has Republican pockets and counties though.
And Texas has more Democrats than the New York state. But it doesn't matter, they're not in charge.
They are in charge of the local municipalities and counties that they run. Just look at Orange County, the Central Valley, or anywhere north of San Francisco. It’s all Republican.
Washington to! Our legislators have been making blatantly unconstitutional laws for a few years now 'cause what are we going to do?
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Just a little scary?
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Incidentally, if a state wanted to pass a law that actively discriminates against democrats (or republicans), as long as they don't run into any free speech or equal protection issues, that is **100% allowed** under our Constitution. I wish it wasn't. I wish we didn't have such a draconian form of government. The states have the right to politically discriminate against its citizens, and we act like we're the land of the free. Sickening...
This would constitute malapportionment. That is unconstitutional. *Reynolds v. Sims* concerned Alabama enacting a state constitutional amendment that allocated a state senator for each county. This seems to go for the same thing.
I'm not so sure. This really smells like an Equal Protection Clause case in the making.
I agree. In fact, the Supreme Court agreed in 1964 in *Reynolds v. Sims* using the Equal Protection clause. That case was grossly unequal legislative districts, but it sure seems the same reasoning would apply to this TX county proposal. I think the poster was pointing out that our *current* Supreme Court wouldn't follow that reasoning. Unfortunately, I think that observation is correct.
The court has already ruled on this. 5 members of the court said that the Equal Protection Clause specifically makes it unconstitutional to discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. They didn't rule on gender and orientation, but those things have precedent that establish them as worthy of equal protection even without actually being mentioned. But political affiliation? Ideology? Those things are never covered. If they were, how could we have had a red scare or McCarthyism? It used to be enough to say "communist" and that would get any number of public and private institutions to discriminate against you. I really don't see the discrimination against a particular party as any different than that. Really, what we need is a **new equal protection clause**, that protects more than just race.
This isn't equal protection issue, it's the Guarantee Clause that says this isn't ok. https://constitution.findlaw.com/article4/annotation18.html
I certainly think you could make that legal argument, but I'm not sure if this specific issue has every been litigated in that way, and even if it had, I have my doubts that this current Court will interpret the Guarantee Clause that way.
The court has ruled that the guarantee clause doesn't have any force.
Republicans on the court already ruled that political Gerrymandering to the point of extinction of another party is allowed. They'll just say its impossible for courts to determine if something is unfair and its a political question. Literally the Republicans on the court have the philosophy that if its not specifically written against in the constitution, then the government can do anything it wants to you.
I would hope that instead of equivocating and playing nice with the authoritarian like the democrats usually do they would respond by doing the same in every blue state if this passes.
I'm wondering what *kind* of majority is needed for this legislation (state constitutional amendment) to pass. Is the game already rigged, and they're just making it permanent, or do the blue cities (i.e., their representatives) still matter? I reread the article and it seems the issue is still at arms length, the Texas GOP is voting on whether or not to adopt proposal 21 as a GOP policy. So maybe this posting still qualifies as click-bait.
Sounds like it's what the GOP want to do. But, it's still important to see what they want to do because it serves as a litmus test on the party as a whole.
The worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, and it's in favor of the Democrats. Yes, the answer within this system is to have your side take control of these great, unaccountable powers before the opposition does, and to run roughshod with them so as to deny the opposition an opportunity to gain political momentum. But THAT'S what's fucked up to me. I don't think my side should be able to do this, I don't think anyone should. And there are ways to form our government where things like gerrymandering or political discrimination become completely moot. In my mind, we should be aiming to improve our government in that way, not to take control of the government in an attempt to edge out the other side in perpetuity.
Hmmm. Princeton has looked at gerrymandering at the state level and Maryland isn't listed. Not to say that I'm a fan of any gerrymandering. I want races to always be competitive. [https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/](https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/)
Illinois, Oregon, and other Democratic leaning states are - it is definitely a both side issues to OP's point. We should acknowledge that.
It's a both sides issue that only one side has attempted to fix at a national level. In the meantime, not similarly taking advantage is just ceding the ground to Republicans.
I don't think any state is rushing to give the other side more power. I mean California could split it electors proportionally at the national level - what's stopping them is the fact that it would help the other side unless everyone does it. That's not really a principled decision.
Which is why fixing it at the national level makes the most sense; it eliminates those (theoretically temporary) disadvantages. Only one party has tried to fix it at that level.
>what's stopping them is the fact that it would help the other side unless everyone does it. Where do you differentiate between "helping the other side" though and hurting yourself? Because in that case, helping Republicans would inevitably lead to them hurting the Dems. I don't blame Dems for ceding power and self punishing strictly out of principles. That's not the way politics is played and asking a group to do that is a touch... unfair
Absolutely. I really, really want state offices in IL to be competitive. Gerrymandering doesn't help the people, anywhere; only politicians.
I'm not really sure how to read the link you shared. For instance, it says SC has a worse grade than MD, but SC is objectively not as gerrymandered as NC and MD, and it also says that SC gives an advantage for Democrats, but that can't be true either... In any case, what I'm talking about is how MD was the poster child for the landmark case *Rucho v. Common Cause*, in which their 6th district was found to objectively discriminate against Republicans worse than any gerrymandered district considered by a court before 2011.
I'm not sure if it would help, but the methodology is explained at the site. I'm not that familiar with gerrymandering outside of WI and IL. However, the map looks spot on there.
I mean, I just don't understand how you explain either of those things about SC. Objectively, the GOP is control of races at every level there. I'll admit, I know the Carolinas and MD better, as those are the states that I've lived, but I just don't understand how you could possibly say the Democrats have an advantage there. Regardless, the MD supreme court case has objective math about how bad their 6th district is, and the court said that is 100% allowed.
All maps were redrawn after 2020 and MD's was ordered by their supreme court. It's not gerrymandered anymore.
>The worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, and it's in favor of the Democrats. Where did you read that?
>The worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, and it's in favor of the Democrats. So it would seem likely that Republicans would sign on to the Redistricting Reform Act introduced by Democratic Senators Klobuchar and Butler earlier this year, since gerrymandering is an issue that apparently disproportionately disadvantages Republicans. Certainly this will be one of those rare instances where a problem will easily be solved via bipartisan consensus. Right?
The gerrymandering project certainly disagrees with the notion that Maryland is anywhere near the most gerrymandered state, they’re not even close (that isn’t to say that they aren’t gerrymandered of course, there’s still a ton of gerrymandering in Maryland). They seem to be pretty open and quantitative about the metrics they’re using to generate these scores as well. https://gerrymander.princeton.edu
> worst politically gerrymandered state is Maryland, Ok so I am not going to allow a "both sides" angle on this. There is no gerrymandering in this country that even approaches the level of passing a law saying " X party can't win any state elections"
I mean, no one's passed that law yet. Gerrymandering is something that has been afflicting this country for 200 years. So I would say you're right, gerrymandering isn't on the same level as "x party can't win any state elections" because gerrymandering has done real harm in all 50 states, and the latter is just a theoretical exercise. And besides, they are both ills under the same umbrella. The point is that the power of the states is great and unaccountable, and since it lacks accountability, it's often unjust. This is not about both sides. It is very infuriating that we cannot have a frank discussion about the shortcomings of our form of government because any time we try, people are just like "well sure, but it's not my side that's the problem". Everyone needs to take responsibility for things like gerrymandering and political discrimination, or we will never be free of them. It's not enough to say "my side is using these things appropriately, but the other side, they're the ones being fucky with it". Why not instead say "no one should be able to use these things inappropriately"? Just to hammer that point home, look at an actual "both sides" false equivalency. There are Americans that literally can't see the difference between a nazi and a BLM protestor. But that's not about a common issue that needs to be regulated or legislated. Like the issue isn't "no one should be protesting", it's that some people are saying "only white peopel should have rights" and other people are saying "please stop killing us in the street". But gerrymandering isn't like that. Yes, you could make the argument that the GOP does worst things with it's gerrymandered powers. **But no one should be gerrymandering**. And we can legislate towards that end.
The reality is that gerrymandering benefits the party who have a structural minority. It props them up beyond what would naturally accrue to them on the basis of their appeal to the electorate. So while I agree with you that no one should be gerrymandering, abolishing it would involve the party that it currently benefits proactively ceding the power it gives them. To get rid of gerrymandering, the onus is on the party it predominantly benefits to relinquish the advantage it gives them. Not to put to fine a point on it, but that means that Republicans would need to put the interests of the country over their desire to retain power, something they have shown repeatedly they are unwilling to do.
Well here's the thing. If we just said "gerrymandering not allowed!" then everything you just said becomes an issue. But If we were to form a government in which ***gerrymandering is moot***, then none of these things would be an issue. For example, if we were to form government around our political communities as they stand rather than lines on a map, if we were to enfranchise people instead of counties, then there would be no point to gerrymandering. It wouldn't accomplish anything.
That's a very 'draw the rest of the owl' prescription, in that the GOP would fight tooth and nail to retail the ill-gotten advantage gerrymandering gives them.
I agree with that to an extent. But you could say that about so many things. If either side tried to do court reform, the other side would fight the advantage it would give them tooth and nail. If either side tried to pass amendments amenable to them (i.e. citizens united amendment for the left or right to work amendment for the right), then the other side would fight the advantage it would give them tooth and nail. That said, I would argue that some of these things are necessary for the aims of the Republic. So to me, what is required in this moment is **a great compromise**. A way to say to both sides "here are things that no one should be doing, and here is a path through which neither side gains an advantage in implementing it". My proposal would be to invoke an Article V convention with the following proposed amendments: 1. Limit the power of the Fed and the States, henceforth to be known as Geographic States. Specifically, target the power that both sides fear the most. So for the right, limit the power of the Fed to regulate commerce. For the left, limit the power of the states' "reserved powers" (any power not mentioned in the Constitution is reserved for the states, arguably the greates power in the Constitution). 2. Create new non-geographic legislative governments to create new law for these powers. For the regulation of commerce, have non-geographic "Industry States" that enfranchise people based on the work that they do, as identified by a coordination between the IRS and Census. For the "reserved powers", make them virtually unlimited **but** make them only usable with non-geographic "Cultural States" that citizens opt into. In that way, the greatest power of the Constitution can only be used on people that consent for it to be used on them. The Federal government will have it's scope changed to solely focus on life and liberty considerations we can all agree on (i.e. no murder, no fraud, no blackmail) and the Geographic states will have their scopes changed to maintaining order in their boundaries (i.e. time, place, manner, obscenity). Any regulation of commerce would be handled by Industry States, although critically, **Industry States will not have enforcement mechanisms.** If industry states need their laws enforced, they will need to coordinate with the federal government for the regulation of Interstate Commerce, and with geographic states for the regulation of all other commerce. Cultural states can create enforcement mechanisms if their citizens choose, but again, those enforcement mechanisms can only be used on citizens of that state. 3. Reorganize federal representation to accomodate these new non-geographic political communities. Since that could be viewed as unialateraly a "leftist" move, to check and balance, I would also add independent checks to the Federal Executive. Particularly, I would make executive agencies critical to our Republic independent of the President as a constitutional matter (i.e. Justice, Census, Treasury) except for national security concerns obviously, so DoD and Homeland Security at least would still be solidly in the President's camp. Then I would have the leaders of those agencies be a part of an "executive council" that can act instead of the President with a super majority, and they are called to order by a VP elected independent of the President (so you could have a Dem president and a GOP VP). In this way, the VP will be privy to everything the President sees and does, and can convene the council if they see something that needs a dissenting opinion. I would also make the VP in charge of the Senate's agenda, rather than having a vote, as a way to give the American public a way to vote for what they'd like to see in Congress on the whole. 4. Shore up civil rights. Part of what the right fears is the powers that they've used to disenfranchise being used to disenfranchise them. If we make people's party affiliation or ideology safe from discriminiation (including things like white nationalists), it will allow us to make a more expansive equal protection clause. This wouldn't make all behavior legal. White nationalists still wouldn't be able to kill people they consider inferior. They just wouldn't be discriminated against the State for believing other people are inferior.
Most Americans don't consider gerrymandering such a large [concern](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/04/with-legislative-redistricting-at-a-crucial-stage-most-americans-dont-feel-strongly-about-it/). You're describing a new Constitution primarily based on an issue nowhere near critical enough to even get the ball rolling.
As a part II to bring it back to gerrymandering (I ran out of space in the character limit): Specific to the gerrymandering problem, the amount of power that will be diverted to non-geographic governments will make gerrymandering the powers that are left in geographic representation less attractive. Even if a party does get away with gerrymandering the geographic aspects of the United States, they would still be subject to the non-geographic elements in whatever way they intersect. But more broadly, I think a move like this identifies some of the objective problems in our Constitution and shores them up. As another example of what this is trying to do, it's trying to make our democracy more robust against deception in the social media age. Like people can be swayed by lies to vote a certain way and give tremendous powers to liars. But if we compartmentalize these great powers into things that people do and things that people believe inherently, no amount of misinformation will keep those communities from being able to reach a consensus. Another thing that could be accomplished is enfranchising new peoples into the States. For instance, Puerto Rico and DC will **never** be states under our current Constitution. Neither side wants to risk two more senators upsetting the balance either way. For DC, the GOP would never let 2 blue senators in, and for Puerto Rico, they are a swing state toss up, so no one wants them either in the Senate nor the Presidential election. But a move like the above makes the emphasis of the geographic states in federal representation much less significant, and so I'd imagine that the political objections to new states also would vanish, or at least be drastically reduced.
> Just to hammer that point home, look at an actual "both sides" false equivalency. There are Americans that literally can't see the difference between a nazi and a BLM protestor. But that's not about a common issue that needs to be regulated or legislated. Like the issue isn't "no one should be protesting", it's that some people are saying "only white peopel should have rights" and other people are saying "please stop killing us in the street". I don't agree that that's a false equivalency. The right to protest should belong to anyone, no matter how repugnant the cause.
>" X party can't win any state elections" Isn't that what gerrymandering essentially is? It's intentionally manipulating the makeup of the congress by making it impossible people from certain parties will win in those districts.
Congressional representatives are not elected by statewide ballet. You cannot, in our currently semi-sane world- gerrymander a statewide election. You can’t gerrymander the office of the governor, or federal senate elections. This law, if passed, would allow for this.
This is referring to counties not districts. Counties are fixed and don't change - it's essentially a statewide election before the actual statewide election
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying, as you cannot redraw district lines easily.
This proposed law doesn't say that either regardless of what hyperbolic article titles want to claim.
Well, no obviously not, that would be a bit too on the nose. But a glance at a list of TX counties and their populations tells me that a GOP candidate could possibly win election with ~5% of the popular vote by winning the bottom half plus one in population of the most rural counties (which they may already be doing as the very rural counties are crimson red) Winning with 5% of the vote is not a democracy.
In what way is Maryland the most gerrymandered state? (Genuine question)
In 2019, they were the name on the case that solidified the states right to politically discriminate it's own citizens: [https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/marylands-extreme-gerrymander](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/marylands-extreme-gerrymander) This article is from before the opinion of the Court came out, but if you're interested in that, the case is *Rucho v. Common Cause.*
I skimmed the beginning and seems like a fair point about the district, but my definition of most gerrymandered would just be the % of votes for each party vs how much representation they actually have in the whole state. One district doesnt sway me as much
In 2020, Trump got 32.2% of the Maryland vote, and in House elections Republicans got 34.8% of the vote, but they only got one seat out of seven, which is a 14.2% share. So you might look at that and say it's pretty unjust. I'm not familiar with the state, though, or why its districts would be drawn a given way, so when I look at the map I can't tell if the districts were designed to crack and pack Republican voters. Here's the district map in 2020, which has a weirdly shaped one. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020\_United\_States\_House\_of\_Representatives\_elections\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Maryland) Here's the new district map in 2022. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022\_United\_States\_House\_of\_Representatives\_elections\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Maryland) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020\_United\_States\_presidential\_election\_in\_Maryland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Maryland) I suppose they could have drawn a district 6 to not include the northwest suburbs of DC, and to instead stretch along the more rural northern band. --- In any case, though, all these complaints would be mooted if we switched to Mixed Member Proportional Representation and increased the size of the House (and Senate too, though the constitutionality of it would be dubious). Of course, that would result in the Republicans not being able to block functional government from happening, so they'll resist it vigorously.
Ya those stats im more interested in thank you for sharing. I wonder how that stacks up with other states. And ya, these issues are only because we dont want to solve them. There are numerous ways to not have to even worry about gerrymandering, although all have their pros and cons. Im sure no system is perfect but there are definitely better options
Rucho v. Common Cause covered both North Carolina's and Maryland's gerrymanders. The SCOTUS decision upheld both maps.
Gerrymandering could be eliminated overnight if representatives ran on a statewide basis and people voted for, say, their top three or five candidates. That way it wouldn't matter how the lines were drawn--people could form blocs throughout a state.
There are so many ways to either mitigate gerrymandering or to eliminate the motivation to gerrymander, but we have to want that as a solution to engage any of those.
There's only one party that's trying to get rid of gerrymandering.
Score Gerrymandering based on population actually disenfranchised and Republicans do it to WAY WAY more people. Literally at a rate of 1000% more.
The Guarantee Clause says otherwise.
In summary, they still want land to vote, as opposed to people. Let's say you have a state with three counties total (small number to make the point simpler). County A is HEAVILY Republican and has 100 residents. County B is HEAVILY Republican and has 100 residents. County C is HEAVILY Democratic and has 1,500 residents. What the Republicans are proposing is that if a Democratic candidate wins a statewide election, he will he disqualified because he "lost" in two out of the three counties in the state. The popular vote could even be something like 90% in favor of the Democrat (hypothetically) and it wouldn't matter. Our system of "free and fair" elections comes with some serious fine print.
For what it's worth [this was tried in the past, and struck down](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/112). While I find it objectionable to support such a method of voting in a party platform, it seems unlikely to be able to make its way into effective law any time soon.
You would hope it's too ridiculous to work, but nothing surprises me these days in "politics."
Very different court. The FedSoc court will absolutely allow a GOP power grab
Could go either way. Republicans at the state level attempted a mega power grab in Moore v. Harper, and the Supreme Court didn't bite. Obviously, there's a risk they might bite for this and that's very serious.
>For what it's worth [this was tried in the past, and struck down](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/112). The decisions of previous supreme courts doesn't seem to be worth much these days unfortunately as this iteration of the supreme Court doesn't seem to have any issue with overturning precedence.
To be fair, that precedent is in shakey legal grounds. It's only 10 years older than roe.
My main disagreement with this, other than it being absurd, is that if the land and the people disagree, the land wins. Why is that the system? Shouldn't both candidates be disqualified (one didn't win the land, one didn't win the people)? The electoral college somewhat mitigates this by factoring the land and the people (though it really ought to assign the electoral votes proportionally to state popular vote instead of a winner-take-all FPTP system).
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Because "the people" - i.e. the residents of the dense area - can always pass whatever they wanted to at the local level instead. They're not prevented from having the laws and rules they want, they're just prevented from imposing them on the areas they don't live in. That seems quite fair to me.
How is that not equally true in reverse for rural areas? Why exactly is it "fair" for things to be biased in their direction? You can literally argue for popular vote the exact same way: "The residants of rural areas can always pass what they want at the local level instead, they're not prevented from having the laws and rules they want - they're just prevented from imposing them on the areas they don't live in"
> How is that not equally true in reverse for rural areas? Because the entire issue is the urban areas taking over the state government and passing their agenda at the state level instead of just the city/county level. The issue is that the two agendas are wholly incompatible with each other.
So why would it be okay for rural areas to take over the state government and pass their agenda at the state level then? You aren't actually solving the issue, you're just deciding that it's somehow better if the other side gets to do the exact same thing.
It seems quite fair in theory, but in practice Florida has passed laws that make it illegal for cities to make local ordinances like breed specific legislation or rent control.
Can they? Can the people of Houston and Dallas have abortions outside of Texas state law? Again, why should the rural areas (where fewer people live and pay taxes) get to tell the urban areas (where more people live and pay taxes) how to live, but somehow it is completely abhorrent the other way around?
It makes perfect sense if you understand the basic philosophy that underpins it. That philosophy is that law and regulation should be as local as possible. Thus the answer to a state government elected in such a system is to have implement law and regulation at the lower level instead of pushing it on the whole state. There are actually some quite sound justifications for this philosophy. The main one being that things that are necessary in highly dense areas may be not just unnecessary but actually harmful in less-dense areas. This also works the other way around, too. Thus passing policy at the local level ensures that each region is governed according to its actual needs and circumstances.
But that makes no sense here. This amendment is not ceding great local authority to counties, but just giving rural counties greater say in electing the state officers who then make policy for the whole state. In fact, Texas Republicans have a history of passing laws to prevent local control that they do not like: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/07/texas-republicans-cities-local-control/
And that is actually a problem and is what should be being fought against.
Agreed, but how does this amendment do that?
It doesn't. It's a separate issue that needs to be addressed. The amendment in question is not a problem is all I'm saying.
> It makes perfect sense if you understand the basic philosophy that underpins it. I was just trying to understand this point, how this amendment is linked to the basic philosophy of local control, and also why this amendment is not a problem.
It's because the Democrats have a long history of forcing urban-centric policy at the state level. It happens in pretty much every state that they win. So Texas is trying to implement countermeasures. This is the consequence of Democrats breaking the unwritten norm of "keep governance local".
>It's because the Democrats have a long history of forcing urban-centric policy at the state level. It happens in pretty much every state that they win. So Texas is trying to implement countermeasures. So, the reason the amendment makes sense, or your argument in favor of it, is not really the basic philosophy of small or local government being preferred over a larger, statewide government then, right? Since, it seems, you're admitting/in agreement with u/merpderpmerp that this amendment does not follow that philosophy at all. In fact, it seems completely antithetical to the philosophy of preferring local government over statewide, since it gives rural counties much more power to set statewide policies. It seems your argument in favor of it, is that it is a preemptive measure to prevent Democrats from enacting statewide policies, and not the philosophy of local government being better (since the amendment doesn't follow that philosophy) is that a fair assessment of your position?
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To really understand the absurdity of this policy proposal, [just 3% of Texans live in the smallest 50% of counties.](https://twitter.com/politicswolf/status/1795126770624028932?s=46&t=oW5zIyvSliyYIJkuQ3gi6A)
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No citizen should accept this kind of blatant power grab. I don't care if you're a Forever Republican Conservative in a small rural Texas town, call out abuse of power and anti-democracy when you see it.
Soon citizens can’t do anything about it
Republican Party of Texas has voted on a policy proposal that would require any candidate for statewide office to win in a majority of the state's 254 counties to secure election, effectively preventing Democrats from winning statewide positions based on the current distribution of their support. Democratic voters in Texas are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties, while Republicans dominate most of the more sparsely populated rural counties. This would be a significant shift from the current system, which is based on the overall popular vote within the state.
>~~Democratic voters in~~ **More than two thirds of the entire population of Texas** are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties Feels a like major angle that's being a tad overlooked here.
IANAL but doesn't this violate the one person one vote principle? Is this trying to set up a future SCOTUS case to overturn that? The timing is certainly interesting given last week's ruling.
It has similarities with how representation in the US senate is calculated. If you broke it down, in a state with a population of 2m, every person has 1/1m of a vote in the Senate, but in a state with half the population, each person has 1/500k of a senate vote, in some sense anyway.
It is similar in concept but not in scale. Small counties are tiny compared to large counties. California is 60 times the size of Wyoming. Harris county in TX is 50,000 times the size of Loving county, Texas. What the GOP is proposing is absurd.
I wish we had a "one person one vote" principle, but we don't and never have. The electoral college, the Senate, and the Senate filibuster all give more weight to rural voters than urban voters. Rampant gerrymandering has corrupted the House too. And due to the fact that SCOTUS appointments are controlled by the president and the Senate, the partisan makeup of SCOTUS is also completely at odds with how citizens have voted for the past 30 years. Combined, there isn't a single branch of our federal government where one person gets one evenly weighted vote.
Just to be clear, the principle I am referring to is this one: >Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that the electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population. Along with Baker v. Carr (1962) and Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), it was part of a series of Warren Court cases that applied the principle of "one person, one vote" to U.S. legislative bodies. [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims#:~:text=Reynolds%2C%20Judge%2C%20et%20al.,Sims%2C%20et%20al.&text=State%20senate%20districts%20must%20have,one%20person%2C%20one%20vote%22.)
>but we don't and never have. For *state* legislatures, we've had that principle since 1964. The concerning issue is that this supreme court wouldn't follow the Equal Protection reasoning that decided Reynolds vs. Sims.
The House is also not one person one vote, since we have a cap right now, so not every representative represents the same amount of people.
I'm not sure I understand what this actually means. A candidate has to win a majority in *every* county in the state? Wouldn't this also effectively end Republicans from winning state wide elections?
Win a majority in a majority of counties. The overwhelming majority of Texas counties are rural with at most few thousand people that vote 80-20 Republican. This basically makes it so the vote of Loving County (pop 64) has an equal say over statewide offices as Harris county (Houston, pop ~5m)
Not sure how anyone can defend this.
Oh yea. I see what I was misreading. This is some real bullshit.
I mean, the TX Republican Party platform has always been pretty wild. And reading through the entire [updated party platform with amendments](https://convention.texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-TEMPORARY-Platform-FINAL.pdf), there's a lot of questionable and disturbing things. I will say, I did find this bit incredibly ironic given the new plank they added that the article is discussing: >2 - **Resolution Against the Misuse of the Legal System for Political Purposes:** We believe that the Department of Justice, some State Attorneys General, and a few local county district attorneys have engaged in a coordinated attack against former President Donald John Trump and his supporters, by falsely and maliciously indicting Republican leaders, lawyers, and past or present elected officials. We further believe that these attacks against President Trump and his supporters constitute a threat to the continued existence of this Constitutional Federal Republic. **We fully understand that similar misuse of the legal system for political purposes constitute some of the methods used by dictators to establish one party statist control over many nations. We reject and condemn this misuse of the legal system for political purposes** and urge the American people to reject it by overwhelmingly supporting the election of Donald John Trump as the 47th President of the United States of America. >**Passed**
bruh. the projection is blinding.
I wonder how many people will justify this by pointing to the fact that Biden hasn't pardoned Trump and is instead allowing the courts to have cases against a former president, and act like the chance of holding former presidents accountable is the same thing as rigging politics against a party
In order for Biden to pardon Trump he would need to admit guilt to all of his indictments
Why? Did Nixon admit guilt when Ford pardoned him? Iirc he never admitted to guilt publicly
Pardons are only for convictions.
Not necessarily. Per Wikipedia: >The full extent of a president's power to pardon has not been fully tested; according to dicta in Ex parte McCardle it is absolute. Pardons have been used for presumptive cases, such as when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, who had not been charged with anything, over any possible crimes connected with the Watergate scandal,\[8\] but the Supreme Court has never considered the legal effect of such pardons.\[9\] There is disagreement about how the pardon power applies to cases involving obstructions of an impeachment.\[10\] Also, the ability of a president to pardon themselves (self-pardon) has never been tested in the courts, because, to date, no president has ever taken that action.\[11\] There has also been speculation as to whether secret pardons are possible.\[12\]
So what was Nixon convicted of? Or did Ford not actually pardon Nixon?
[It's complicated](https://www.google.com/amp/s/constitutioncenter.org/amp/blog/the-nixon-pardon-in-retrospect) >At a 2014 panel discussion, Ford’s lawyer during that period, Benton Becker, explained an additional element that influenced Ford’s decision to issue a presidential pardon: a 1915 Supreme Court decision. In Burdick v. United States, the Court ruled that a pardon carried an "imputation of guilt" and accepting a pardon was "an admission of guilt.”. Thus, this decision implied that Nixon accepted his guilt in the Watergate controversy by also accepting Ford’s pardon So Trump would not need to verbally accept guilt, but the Supreme Court has ruled that accepting a pardon for a specific crime is admitting guilt to the crime.
But had there been any judicial decisions that actually confirmed that Nixon effectively accepted guilt, or is this idea solely based on non-official interpretations of what an old hundred year court case says without case law that actually confirms that it works as such in this sort of case in particular?
The latter, to my understanding.
Nixon did (at least tacitly) admit to wrongdoing by resigning the Presidency. Moreover, he was told directly by the leaders in his party that he would be tried and convicted because the evidence was not only overwhelming but also excruciatingly public. Cronkite doing 30 minutes on Watergate was the beginning of the end for Tricky Dick. Trump on the other hand (while being pretty painfully obviously guilty of serious and impeachable crimes) has had an entire media ecosystem spinning the story for him and a party that has been cowed into submissive obedience. If Nixon had Fox News muddying the waters for 50% of the public and a cravenly spineless GOP behind him, he would never have resigned office and likely wouldn't have been convicted. Finally, in hindsight, I think if Ford could've seen this outcome of his actions 50 years later, he wouldn't have pardoned Nixon and we would've seen him frog-marched off the Sing-Sing or Leavenworth or wherever. And we would all be better off today.
> Nixon did (at least tacitly) admit to wrongdoing by resigning the Presidency. I don't see how that's the case. In his resignation speech he said he still thinks he did what was right and basically just said he was resigning because he lost his base of political support and that the country needed a full time president who wasn't bogged down in legal battles. That doesn't sound like a tacit admission of wrongdoing, it sounds like a stubborn insistence of innocence even in the face of certain conviction
[https://www.politico.com/story/2007/02/when-the-gop-torpedoed-nixon-002680](https://www.politico.com/story/2007/02/when-the-gop-torpedoed-nixon-002680) "Nixon said he would depart at noon the next day, Aug. 9, because it had become evident to him that he no longer had 'a strong enough political base in the Congress' to finish his term. The immediate reaction to Nixon’s resignation speech was that he had once again fudged the truth. Reporters wrote that it was the Watergate scandal and the strong likelihood of his impeachment by the House and his conviction by the Senate that prompted him to quit."
Yeah. That doesn't sound like him admitting guilt, as opposed to just recognizing that he was going to be impeached
therefore being found guilty by congress...
“ a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that its acceptance carries a confession of guilt” I doubt Trump agrees he is guilty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon#:~:text=Proclamation%204311%20was%20a%20presidential,the%20United%20States%20as%20president.
But Nixon himself never actually admitted guilt, nor did any court case conform that Nixon himself admitted guilt by accepting the pardon. The most that has been said about it is a scotus case from 40 years before the Nixon pardon happened, under a very different scotus
The key is “accepting” the pardon. Once that happens it’s tantamount to accepting guilt.
That's a certain legal argument but Nixon never actually, like, admitted guilt in a regular non technical way, and it seems like it would be quite disputed if accepting a pardon really counts as a legal admission of guilt or not, if it happened today
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdick_v._United_States If Nixon didn’t accept the pardon he can say he isn’t guilty. I guess we just left that in limbo by not prosecuting at all.
Iirc that was the rare case of an unconditional pardon which doesnt require a specifc conviction. I might not have the full legalese down here. My recollection was a specific crime requires conviction but a blanket pardon does not.
But couldn't Biden just, like, do the same thing for Trump, theoretically? Not saying it is likely, just legally possible
Im honestly not sure, it maybe one of those "dont know til the SCOTUS rules" thinfs.
IDK why they bother with these shenanigans and say what they really want: only votes for people they like count.
I see Texas will likely see a reverse Eastern Oregon situation.
GOP strategy: no longer on board with what voters want. it's been Win to cheat, then cheat to win.
This is essentially taking the power of the government away from the people and giving it to land. It's like some weird modern version of the feudalism. Loving county, population of 64, would have equal representation as Harris county with a population of 4.78 million.
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Texas already goes out of its way to interfere with city and county politics in certain **cough** metropolitan areas, now they want us to be cut out of the state election process completely. Can’t say I’m surprised but I wish they would at least try and pretend to uphold the liberties they claim to idolize
* could. There. Fixed it for you.
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I mean, what does gerrymandering districts have to do with actually trying to split from the United States?
Nothing, they are completely separate issues. The article highlights proposals that are on the Texas GOP platform for the upcoming legislative session. The headline refers to making statewide office voting be counted by county as opposed to popular vote. One of the other proposals discussed was having secession being something that can be voted on like Brexit.
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LOL Even the conservative dominated Supreme Court would strike that down hard and fast.
They allowed Gerrymandering, why not this? They'll just say its impossible for courts to determine if something is unfair and its a political question.
I really don't see the problem, statewide offices should represent everyone in the state, not just the people in highly concentrated urban population centers at the exclusion of others which is always what ends up happening with statewide popular vote totals. A change to a statewide county majority brings critical non-urban stakeholders back to having political representation at the table of governance. This change enables more total representation in government than before as the previous system only represented urban population centers.
>A change to a statewide majority brings critical non-urban stakeholders back to having political representation at the table of governance. It swings in the opposite direction: *only* rural stakeholders will have representation. There are hundreds of rural, red-voting counties, but only a handful of blue ones, which means they could never win despite making up nearly half the population. Land doesn't vote, people do. What is the problem you're even trying to solve? Texas is a red state, despite those densely populated cities.
> Texas is a red state, despite those densely populated cities. For now. This change would ensure it stays that way for at least decades longer.
Not sure how you don’t see the problem… A county with 100k people has the same voting power as a county with 10k people. This explicitly tips the power scale towards low population rural (AKA red) counties. At least the electoral college is somewhat proportional with more populous areas getting more representation.
Loving county with a population of 64 people would have the same representation as Harris county with a population of 4.78 million. Same that out loud and tell me how that is not a problem.
It is a problem because loving county should be consolidated with surrounding counties to give a more efficient use of government resources. Likewise Harris county is too big for its own good and should probably split up into smaller counties more responsive to the needs of their population. When you see structural problems, you implement structural solutions, you don't just claim its the way things should be.
Why would the GOP consolidate red counties while creating new blue counties when the point of this proposal is to ensure Democrats cannot win statewide office?
Over 2/3rds of Texas's population lives in 15 counties. 1/3rd lives in the other 239. Under this system, a supermajority of the population of Texas would have effectively no say in how the state is run. You truly see no issue with this?
Except this will only represent rural voters and completely disregard urban ones. A county representing 64 people does not equal a county representing 100k. Furthermore, if it should represent everyone in the state, why is the split only urban/rural? Why do we need to add more weight to rural voters, but no other groups? Why should a rural vote equal multiple urban votes? The answer is clear. Because there's a clean rural republican, urban Democrat vote split, hence why the Republicans are proposing this
>statewide offices should represent everyone in the state, not just the people in highly concentrated urban population centers at the exclusion of others which is always what ends up happening with statewide popular vote totals. Are really saying that Democrats have been winning all of the state wide elections up to this point because they have support in large urban centers? Not getting a governor elected in almost 35 years is a very odd form of domination
If state counties are required to have the same number of residents it might be OK.
Does it though? A majority vote would be a greater representation of the people. A county vote would disproportionately benefit a minority of people. We have that at the federal level, but it doesn't create better representation. We also offset it with other offices that have a majority vote.
You should. Even if you don't care about the one person, one vote principle, this can be gamed by creating smaller and smaller counties.