Barack Obama has not given up on his crusade to fundamentally change America.
Since leaving office, Obama has launched a new project to rig elections in favor of Democrats.
But his plan hit a snag when the Supreme Court gave him some very bad news.
Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder have teamed up on a project – the National Democratic Redistricting Committee – to fight so-called “partisan gerrymandering.”
After the Republican midterm sweep in 2010, the GOP takeover of state legislatures allowed them to draw Congressional and state legislature district maps after the 2010 census.
State legislature’s drawing the district maps has been a standard feature of American politics.
But since Democrats lost the 2010 elections, they did not end up with maps that favored them.
And now, rather than winning elections to try and take back state legislatures ahead of the 2020 census, Democrats are scheming to default to their fallback political position of using the courts to win the victories they can’t achieve at the ballot box.
Wisconsin Democrats filed a lawsuit seeking to strike down the map Republicans drew after winning control of the state legislature.
They claimed they “packed and cracked” into legislative districts that denied the Democrats a chance to win the votes necessary to advance their policy agenda.
This case – Gill v. Whitford – made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
But in a shocking defeat for anti-gerrymandering Democrats like Obama, the Supreme Court found the plaintiffs lacked the standing to bring the case.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the plaintiffs were trying to throw out the whole map, when their complaints was with specific districts:
“Here, the plaintiffs’ partisan gerrymandering claims turn on allegations that their votes have been diluted. That harm arises from the particular composition of the voter’s own district, which causes his vote—having been 16 GILL v. WHITFORD Opinion of the Court packed or cracked—to carry less weight than it would carry in another, hypothetical district. Remedying the individual voter’s harm, therefore, does not necessarily require restructuring all of the State’s legislative districts. It requires revising only such districts as are necessary to reshape the voter’s district—so that the voter may be unpacked or uncracked, as the case may be.”
Democrats are focused on getting “non-partisan” experts or hand-picked judges to draw legislative maps because they know the districts they will produce will rig elections going forward for the left.
The left successfully petitioned judges to overturn the district map Republicans drew in Pennsylvania.
Federal judges redrew the map to favor Democrats and that boosted their chances of winning back the House.
Democrats were seeking to do nationally what they achieved in Pennsylvania by winning a Supreme Court precedent to overturn GOP maps heading into the 2018 elections.
Party officials believe they will be riding a blue wave this fall and they want judges to draw Democrat-friendly districts so they can maximize their gains.
Democrats and the media had no problem with gerrymandering when the Democrats were the ones drawing the districts.
The real “harm” alleged by the left after Republicans drew the district maps in states like Wisconsin was that the map wasn’t rigged in their favor.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in the 2018 midterm elections.
