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Stephen Gottlieb: Whitford Versus Gill

Commentators have treated the Court’s decision in Whitford v. Gill, the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, as just a technical decision, a delay in getting a substantive decision out of the Court. They’re nuts and I’m furious.

Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is stalling for time. Time serves the Republicans in several ways: the most likely and immanent resignation is from Justice Kennedy who is the weak link in the conservative justices’ opposition to doing anything about gerrymandering; the oldest member of the Court is Justice Ginsburg and she is reliable in demanding equal protection in voting arrangements; replacing either of those justices while Trump is president would give Republicans a solid 5-vote majority in all elections cases and just about everything else. It would lock in the Republican majority. Roberts is trying as hard as he can to lock in Republican victories at all foreseeable elections, after famously telling the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he was merely an umpire calling balls and strikes. Umpires like that should be fired.

He also unleashed another ploy that people did not understand. By insisting that standing – a technical term for the right to sue – has to be asserted by plaintiffs based on their specific districts rather than statewide to challenge inequality in voting arrangements, he actually tried to shred plaintiffs’ proof. The best explanations of what gerrymandering is follow what the people who draw the lines actually do – they try for the best and most reliable statewide partisan vote for their party. But Roberts says that’s not justiciable. He wants proof for each district in which the voters votes are wasted and their voting power is diluted. But the basis of the dilution claim is precisely the equal protection comparison with all the other districts. If that is out of bounds, plaintiffs are entitled to take a walk to the outhouse.

But, a lawyer writing friendly-seeming language so that people will not understand how badly they are being affixed by a threaded metal fastener to the wall of defeat, Roberts makes it sound like they can just sharpen their presentation and then all will be just fine. Roberts should be impeached as unworthy of the robes of justice.

I’d go further. Many scholars have argued quite convincingly that over its two-and-a-quarter centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has done much more harm than good. Some of us nearing the end of our careers happened to start practice at a time when we did have a people’s Court, a court that believed in equality and ended segregation, a court that believed in democracy and ended malapportionment, a court that believed in accurate fact-finding and tried to end abuses in the system of so-called criminal justice. But that Court has gradually slipped out of reach until the present Court has become an apologist for the abuses of the rich and the powerful, giving corporations the power to shred the rights of employees, customers, neighbors and political opponents.

So I think it’s time for some constitutional amendments that would really make a difference

  • End the electoral college in favor of voting for president by popular vote, ending the reign of minority presidents like Trump – unless the courts still manage to protect underworld control of elections
  • End the treatment of corporations as legal persons and let them face the regulatory ax
  • End gerrymandering and put an end to control by judicial partisans who shred the meaning of both equality and democracy
  • And, my favorite, an amendment to delete Article III and abolish the so-called Supreme Court – I’d like to see Roberts homeless, without a job, a robe or any of the respect due a decent person.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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