CT Blue

This is interesting:

.. [I]n Illinois, the bipartisan League of Women Voters is challenging gerrymandered districts based on a new legal claim: that it violates free speech. While a district court already dismissed its claim, the League of Women Voters can—and has—appealed to the Supreme Court. Because it’s a redistricting case, the court will have to rule on the matter.

“This is the first time a really bipartisan group has challenged gerrymandering as a regulation of speech,” says Thomas Geoghegan, the attorney for the group. “What’s really shocking is that in front of our eyes for years the states have been moving people from one place or another based on the views they have expressed not in the polling place…but because you have identified yourself as a Democrat or a Republican.”

The legal argument takes advantage of the Supreme Court’s recent and controversial Citizens United ruling, in which restrictions on corporate spending in political campaigns were deemed restrictions on speech. According to the court, concerns about fairness and balance were not enough to warrant the campaign finance laws.

According to appeal, similar concerns about fairness and competition are used to justify gerrymandering in Illinois. “In ostensibly acting to ensure competitive campaigns,” reads LWV’s appeal, “the state relocates citizens to new or different districts with the specific purpose of countering or offsetting speech in favor of one political party with speech from the other.” Furthermore, the appeal goes, the determination is based on people’s activism and vocal identification as Democrats or Republicans—what’s known as a “content-based” regulation of speech as opposed to a neutral piece of criteria.

(Quibble: the League is non-partisan, not bipartisan. There is a world of difference.)

The argument they’re making is certainly a compelling one. If anything should be unconstitutional, it’s gerrymandering, particularly in its modern form. When Elbridge (sp?) Gerry walked the land, the tools he had at hand were crude. Today, given computers, etc., a party so disposed can turn a transitory majority into a permanent one so long as they are in power in the legislative cycle of any year ending in zero. For us Democrats, it would be a great help to see the court rule in favor of the League, since we have a habit of losing big in years ending in zero (some might almost conclude its intentional) and even when we don’t, we have another habit of wanting to play fair with our opposition (witness Connecticut, which almost bent over backward enough to insure a Republican House member).

I’m way too lazy to do the research or read the briefs, but it seems to me that a court that holds that the First Amendment protects the rich from state funded response by the lower 99 might have a difficult time explaining why the state can be allowed to dilute or strengthen the votes of a group of voters based solely on their beliefs expressed in their voting registration and in their votes. If the state can’t provide public funds to match private spending because doing so tips the scale against the shouters, why should it be allowed to referee ideas in another forum and make decisions about redistricting using ideas as a criteria.

Of course, this argument, which might appeal to the justices if it benefitted Republicans, will get nowhere, and they’ll have no trouble finding distinctions that allow the ghettoization of Democrats while still upholding the rights of corporations to buy elections in the name of free and unfettered speech, free of government involvement. This court is probably the most intellectually dishonest in history, so even if the result the League seeks were literally compelled by their prior rulings, they’d find a way to rule for the Republicans. Nonetheless, a noble effort. Seems like good fodder for a Colbert “attack”.