“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.”
U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1.
“The Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] the Electors [for the president & vice president], and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 3.
As the GOP loses the presidency by the widest margin in recent elections, why their arrogant sneer? While southern sensibilities augur in their favor in the two Senatorial runoffs elections, as each party is dumping tens of millions into Georgia to attempt to take a Senate majority, that sneer seems to continue. The Republican Party, knowing Trump lost, is still willing to pretend that he has a shot in hell of retaining his office. Arrogance or smart politics? The base requires such a response, it seems. But there is a GOP arrogance, nonetheless. Why?
They’ve made serious inroads into our Latinx community, especially among male voters. The Latinx community may have pushed the Dems over the top, but their contribution to the aggregate vote, under 30% in 2016, rose to about a third supporting the President this go-round. Some argue it’s anti-Castro conservative Cubans in Florida that gave the GOP the edge in that state. Others point to religious conservatism, but Catholicism is one of many faiths now claiming Latinx adherents these days.
“President Trump increased his share of Latino support from 2016, not only in Florida and Texas but in several other states. In Georgia, for instance, he did 10 points better with Latino voters this time around; in Nevada, he improved by eight points. This happened even though the president started his first campaign by slandering Mexican immigrants, appeared indifferent to Puerto Ricans affected by Hurricane Maria, and separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents and placed them in cages. Even in down-ballot races, Latinos didn’t lift Democrats as many hoped they would.” Geraldo Cadava writing for the November 13th Boston Globe. Scratch the surface, and there are many explanations, but dig even deeper, and that old adage, it’s the economy stupid, just may be the culprit. 80% of the huge Latinx turn out cited the economy as their highest priority.
Among Black voters, women were unequivocal in their rejection of Donald Trump. Joining first time voters, they easily countered the 57% of white voters who cast their ballots for the President. These are solid trends for Democrats. However, among Black men, Trump saw a rise in their support. Biden won obviously. The Dems still control the House. But there is a great big fly in the Democratic soup, no matter the final result in the Senate runoffs or even the certification of Biden as the obvious victor in the nation’s top office. The Republican Party retained a majority state legislatures with wins. GOP governors and state legislators ate Democratic lunch, and even the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives narrowed significantly. Perhaps therein lies the justification for the GOP sneer.
Outside of little more than a dozen states where redistricting is handled either by specifically designated redistricting commissions or other non-purely legislative determinations, most states have relegated the creation of congressional districts to their legislatures. In Rucho vs Common Cause (2019), the US Supreme Court seemed to pull the US judiciary out of forcing state legislatures, most of which have wide discretion to set federal districts, to be fair and just in their determinations: “The justices, in a landmark 5-4 ruling that could reverberate through U.S. politics for years to come, ruled for the first time that federal judges do not have the authority to curb partisan gerrymandering - a decision that could embolden state lawmakers to intensify use of the practice.
“The court ruled along ideological lines in the decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, with its conservative members in the majority and liberals in dissent. The court sided with Republican lawmakers in North Carolina and Democratic legislators in Maryland who drew electoral district boundaries that were challenged by voters as so politically biased that they violated rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” Reuters, 6/27/19. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said: "We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," adding, "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."
It seems that the only exceptions open to judicial challenges might be redistricting openly aimed at constitutionally prohibited acts (like intentionally marginalizing voting power based on race or religion). While the Court has been asked to review several gerrymandering cases to clarify these limits, it is absolutely clear that historically, the Supreme Court has been loath to contain political choices by state legislatures.
With the every-decade Census being the determinant of the number and apportionment of how House seats are allocated to which states… and with the Trump administration doing all it could, from cutting Census funding to limiting fieldworkers’ ability to outreach into minority communities – all exacerbated by the pandemic – the GOP is now laser focused on containing any efforts to insure greater Census accuracy or to limit political gerrymandering, a strategy that appears to be working. Dems are focused on getting a resistant and newly configured conservative US Supreme Court to define those constitutional limits to gerrymandering.
“While the faceoff between Trump and Joe Biden sucked up all of the oxygen of the election cycle, many Republicans and Democrats had their eyes trained on the completion of the census and the control of state legislatures… Republicans had majority control; Democrats believed they could flip eight legislatures. With the dust now beginning to settle, it appears that not much has changed from the last round of elections besides Republicans' gaining control of New Hampshire's House and Senate.
“‘You know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. What we've been doing for the last decade has been working despite the conventional wisdom that our run of success in the states was going to come to an abrupt close,’ said David Abrams, deputy executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee.
“The country had the fewest partisan change in legislatures since 1944, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but the fight over those maps could long outlive the next presidency… Democrats may have won the presidency, but they failed to fulfill one of their biggest hopes of this election cycle: taking control of state legislatures and the power to draw electoral districts.
“Now, organizers and party officials said, they will be forced to bank on litigation, friendly state courts, Democratic governors, recent state reforms and a growing grassroots movement to hold the line against their fears of Republican gerrymandering — embedding a political advantage in the drawing of electoral maps.
“‘Let's have fair maps. Let's have an actual battle of ideas,’ said Patrick Rodenbush, communications director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. ‘Republicans are afraid of the voters they say they want to represent, and they are cheating the American people out of representation by doing this.’… After each census is completed, state legislatures take up the responsibility of drawing the maps for congressional and legislative districts. Republicans took control of the majority of state Houses after the 2010 census, and they were able to maintain much of that dominance this year.
“Republicans said they plan to try to cement their power in the drawing of 30 state maps. Democrats control 19 legislatures… The goal once the new census data come in, said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, is to redraw maps to ‘protect our legislative majorities, protect our congressional incumbents and then expand our ability to take over the House in 2022 and beyond.’
“That Republicans maintained their hold is a major disappointment for Democrats, who invested more than $50 million from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and millions more from a constellation of progressive groups… The large investments were first sparked by Donald Trump's election in 2016, as a growing number of liberal activists and organizers realized that state governments could act as a check on the president.
“After having lost more than 900 legislative seats since the 2010 election, Democrats began to make gains again in 2017 and 2018. Even though the Democrats invested heavily in states like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Texas and Iowa — among others — Republicans retained power over the chambers they had before.” NBCNews.com, November 13th.
That the United States is now well-over 85% urban (it was 94% agricultural/ rural in 1789, when voting structures were configured), the rural bias is baked into the Constitution; states retain a strange and disproportionate power that is unrelated to the population. California, with 40 million people, has exactly the same two US Senators as does Wyoming with around 600,000 people. We use an electoral presidential election system that has denied a clear popular vote victory five times in US history, most recently in 2000 (Gore vs Bush) and 2016 (Clinton vs Trump).
Given the profound difficulty of amending the Constitution (particularly in these over-polarized times), the demographic realities that favor Democrats by increasing margins – a younger, more diverse and less “white traditional” electorate that skews away from GOP leanings – have been and seem destined to continue to be negated by GOP efforts to marginalize and suppress any potential voters who favor Democrats… all within arcane legal political structures that have led The Economist) in recent years – as determined in its Democracy Index of 167 countries; the latest released on January 22nd – to describe the United States as a flawed Democracy.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it deeply disturbing when one of our two main political parties is working overtime to keep its opponents from having a fair voting voice in our major elections.
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