State V Mcghee: Fill & Download for Free

There’s a pending case that could change that, but mainly the issues so far have been in proving to the courts’ satisfaction that redistricting (an inherently political process) has been carried out in a manner that offends the Equal Protection Clause or some other provision of the Constitution. “To the courts’ satisfaction” means identifying some kind of more or less objective standard or rule that can be applied to any situation, and make the courts feel as though they are not meddling in politics.Enter Whitford v. Gill.It’s fascinating stuff and rather than rephrase it poorly I am going to excerpt and link to an article about it I read in Salon in March of this year.Gerrymandering, the process of drawing distorted legislative districts to undermine democracy, is as old as our republic itself. Just as ancient: the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to get involved and determine a standard for when a partisan gerrymander has gone too far.That might be changing. During the 2000s, Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed openness to a judicial remedy, if an evenhanded measure could be devised to identify when aggressive redistricting was no longer just politics as usual.When the pivotal swing justice looks for a standard, law professors and redistricting nerds get to work. There are now several cases related to the extreme maps drawn after the 2010 census – by Republicans in Wisconsin and North Carolina, and by Democrats in Maryland – on a collision course with the Supreme Court.The case with the most promise to deliver a lasting judicial remedy is Whitford v. Gill, from Wisconsin, which advances a fascinating standard called the “efficiency gap.” It is the brainchild of law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Eric McGhee, but has an elegant simplicity that is easily understandable outside of academia. If gerrymandering is the dark art of wasting the other party’s votes – either by “packing” them into as few districts as possible, or “cracking” them into sizable minorities in many seats – the efficiency gap compares wasted votes that do not contribute to victory.In November, a panel of federal judges smiled upon this standard and ruled that the state assembly districts drawn by a Republican legislature in the Whitford case represented an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. “Although Wisconsin’s natural political geography plays some role in the apportionment process, it simply does not explain adequately the sizable disparate” advantage held by Republicans under these new maps, wrote the court.Meet the man who may end gerrymandering: A retired Wisconsin law professor’s Supreme Court case could save democracyHow do you explain the efficiency gap to your friends and neighbors? It’s complicated and involves math. What’s the elevator pitch?I simply start out talking about “packing and cracking.” They’re the essential tools of gerrymandering. I don’t really stress the efficiency gap. If I had to explain the efficiency gap, I’d go to the concept of lots of wasted votes – but I would first start off with packing and cracking, then explain wasted votes in the context of packing and cracking.And what do we mean by “wasted votes” in this context?Wasted votes are all the votes for the losing candidate plus all the votes for the winning candidate above 50 percent plus one.The art of gerrymandering is the art of wasting the other side’s votes as efficiently as you can.Yes, and the efficiency gap measures the way that a party favored to win does so by wasting as few votes as possible – voters that can then be spread into other districts. The party that’s disfavored by the maps wins their seats by a substantial margin. Those voters are packed into that district. In a cracked district, there are a lot of wasted votes for the losing party – who might get 45 percent – but very few for the winning party. That’s how I explain it.Did a bell go off in your head when you saw this paper? This is it! This is the standard that we’re looking for?It’s a possible standard. To tell you the truth, in the meetings with Nick and Ruth in Milwaukee …I mean, people were talking about it today as the long-sought holy grail.Some people were attracted to the efficiency gap. Others said, “Well, just a minute now, we want a test case of partisan gerrymandering. We don’t want this to be a case which gets Nick Stephanopoulos his Ph.D. thesis!” I’ve become a fan more and more as time has gone on. But you have to remember, we were kind of beggars. At the time, we were looking for some free lawyers who would take the case!An awful lot of luck has to happen. Assuming we win this case, a lot of little lucky things had to happen in the interim, like the recall election that allowed the Democrats to take control of the State Senate, without which we wouldn’t have gotten a lot of the discovery – the hard drives, the emails – that was part of the smoking gun on partisan intent.When the Republicans redistricted, they set it up in a way designed to produce confidentiality: They had the State Senate and Assembly hire a lawyer with state funds, then sent over the actual map drawers – many of whom were legislative staffers – made them employees of the law firm, and tried to protect all their work under lawyer-client privilege. The courts blew through that and required disclosure.But when the Democrats got control of the State Senate, they were suddenly clients of the law firm, because they were using state funds. They asked the law firm for the records. The law firm complied – and we discovered there were things that had been turned over to the State Senate leadership that should have been in the disclosure to the lawyers in the previous case, but were not: hard drives that contained not only the emails, but all the memorandums, all the drafting documents, draft maps, everything. The court just flipped at that.What would you call the most insidious effects of partisan gerrymandering?Well, I’d say there are two consequences that are most insidious. There are the various consequences in terms of legislation. Certainly the substantial defunding of the University of Wisconsin system, the right-to-work legislation – those would be examples.The other impact is the noticeable dampening of enthusiasm for campaigning for local elections. At a statewide level, when you try to recruit people to run for office or work for campaigns, they think the idea of putting Democrats into the majority is hopeless. It’s had a real chilling effect in that respect, and quite understandably so.There was an amazing number out of Wisconsin in 2016: Out of 99 state Assembly districts, 47 lacked a major-party challenger. Everyone looked at the districts, measured the likelihood of winning, and passed on even making a race.That’s a pretty big number. It’s the lack of competitive seats. The efficiency gap nicely sums it up – there are many more Democratic seats that are won with 75-percent-plus of the votes than Republican seats. There are very few swing districts. The Democrats’ votes are packed, cracked and wasted. Then there are a bunch of Republican seats [where] they win around 55 or 60 percent – they win many more seats, much more efficiently.What is your hope? Ideally what is the best result, as you look at this?I hope we win. I hope the courts begin to get into the area of setting some limits. All the data shows that gerrymandering is only getting worse, by both sides. It’s a problem, and a national one, of single-party control.Right now, Republicans are doing it more than Democrats. That’s because more states have single-party Republican control than [are controlled by] Democrats. But I’m not claiming Democrats are holier than thou. The courts can shake that up a bit, and they need to. But it’s only going to set some limits. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of partisan gerrymandering.It’s very encouraging to see everything that’s going on around the country. This is a real problem for democracy and an increasing number of people seem to understand that. Ultimately, we have to get redistricting out of the hands of legislatures. There are problems with commissions and a lot of issues about how you structure them. They’ll need structure from the courts. But the first essential step is to take the power away from legislators.Have you spent any time examining alternative election forms like ranked-choice voting or multi-member districts, both of which would be more effective in providing choice and options to voters than a commission?I am hardly an expert but I am familiar, because I am a political junkie and my friends do this kind of stuff. My gut tells me that’s a harder sell – but it’s certainly possible that you could get ranked-choice voting in many states and municipalities. That seems to be a good system to me, but it could take a while.You started in a tea room. Now you’re on the verge of the Supreme Court. Not a bad run – and you could go down in history as the plaintiff who changed everything.If we win, my grandchildren will know me as the plaintiff in this case. They won’t know what I did as a law professor. I get a lot of congratulations, but I really feel like what I did was a relatively small amount. My role has been small compared to a lot of the others. My fear would be that we win, and then there’s a change on the Supreme Court a year or two later, and it all somehow ends up reversed.It’s nice symmetry to have spent time studying Baker v. Carr, and then coming back around to this. It’s been fun and it’s been a good retirement activity. Saving democracy.

This answer might piss some liberals off…If we look at Northern cities’ modern desegregation status…Still not even today.This picture was taken April 5, 1976. The man with the flag is attacking a black man…over a new Massachusetts law desegregating state schools and white folk literally rioted.New York in the 1960s had similar issues with busing, though it didn’t escalate into riots like in Boston in the 1970s.Feb. 3, 1964: New York City School Children Boycott School - Zinn Education ProjectChildren boycotted school for integration…and it helped…in a way, but nothing really has changed in the end.See my comment below as a footnote in how Joe Biden helped prevent busing on a federal level until it was no longer a fashionable solution in the 80s and 90s. This was a widespread position amongst all people. He’s far from the only one, and as much as he might have had the best intentions, it was bad policy, and in 40 years, he’s grown.Here’s a fascinating Podcast about the issues facing NYC schools: Nice White Parents. It’s a brilliant listen and dives deep into how NYC schools are still, currently, de facto segregated. A number of factors have lead to this segregation:Schools being funded by property taxes of the localities[1]Black and Brown people being kept out of free wealth enabling programs from half a century earlier preventing the creation of generational wealth[2] [3] [4]Policies preventing Black and Brown people from building wealth more recently like:Red Lining[5]White flight[6] combined with Suburban racist covenants[7]that explicitly make it so Black and Brown people cannot purchase property in the neighborhood.Subprime mortgages nearly being forced on them even if they could qualify for traditional mortgage packages[8] [9] [10]The above policies have created de facto segregated communities.Combine that with schools being locally funded by property taxes and you have poorly funded schools in poor neighborhoods while less than a mile away you have absolutely gorgeous, state of the art facilities.School choice[11]allows people in a place with a poor school to go to a different one that’s not in their locality. On its face it doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but it is primarily utilized by white families to go to primarily white schools.Uneven policing practices like broken window policing, increased conviction rates, higher sentencing, etc.[12] [13] [14][15]None of these issues are restricted to a particular region, a lot of it happened in the North — NYC and Massachusetts for example.To zone in on school choice, going into middle school there is a hard fight to get into the best public schools. Parents and students take tours, go to interviews, share portfolios, most minority families are kept out of the loop to the point when they don’t even know this political game exists…when they do, they’re too damn busy to try to leverage it.In recent interviews parents actually referred to the “good schools” as “white schools” and the key indicator people look for in a school was how white it was.A side note: Not all School Choice policies lead to segregation. That said, it shouldn’t be necessary.Neighborhoods fought hard in the 1970s to desegregate…but when it happened, the same parents moved their kids to a different school so that they weren’t disadvantaged by it.The school board, city, and state have taken a sort of…appeasement strategy for the parents, akin to how the slave owners were given reparations for their slaves being set free (no, the parents in cities are not nearly as bad on any level as slave-owners). They don’t want to tip any boats and every time there’s a proposal, a group of wealthy parents will quietly make it go away.Some have proposed Charter schools as a solution, they boast great test scores, but for the most part this is managed by a quiet culling of the student body, working within the parameters to make underachieving students be unwelcome and/or find a justification for expulsion.The effect on the minority and lower class children is palpable.Another episode of This American Life with the journalist who did Nice White Parents looks at programs that tantalize these kids who don’t have everything and how they’re harmed by it, and how it affects those kids that actually made it: 563: The Problem We All Live With - Part Two - This American LifeFor them, they are grown up being told by society that they don’t deserve anything. When they’re given something, good, finally, the message takes hold and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They shut down and drop out.The toll society — even in the most liberal of cities — has on the under privileged is monstrous.There’s a lot more to this story, as well. One of the after effects of Brown v. The Board of Education is that all the Black educators were fired and Black schools were closed. Studies have shown that, at least in this society, one of the best indicators of a Black student’s success is if they have a Black teacher or principal early in their education.Revisionist History Season 2 Episode 3So while the schools are effectively integrated, Black students were still discriminated against through paternalistic teachers, people talking down on them and constant reminders that they don’t belong.Segregated schools were never a good thing either, it reinforced these issues in a far more stark manner, through actual physical separation and lack of exposure. On top of that the black students weren’t able to even see what they were missing out on from actually having a budget for schools. Again, Listen to episode 563 of This American Life linked above. There are star students at the schools in an impoverished, minority neighborhood in brooklyn who went to the “white school” less than a mile away and were blown away, left feeling more angry than anything else at the quality difference.The minority schools couldn’t even offer AP courses or classes like Calculus, when students who were smart enough and driven enough to have taken them finally got the chance, they were left behind, and left believing the myth that they didn’t deserve it because of how they were born.I would recommend this book:The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together: McGhee, Heather: 9780525509561: Amazon.com: BooksIf you don’t want to read the book, here’s a great interview she did with Ezra Klein: Opinion | What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs AmericaIt’s full of examples that demonstrate how racism has guided policy in America. Across the country American communities built fancy public pools, when it was required for public pools to be integrated racially, most communities simply shut down their pools, drained them or poured concrete in them. Some sold them for $1 to be run privately rather than have Black people swimming in the same pools.When Cities Closed Pools to Avoid Integration | JSTOR DailyEven when people haven’t actively thought about it, most of the policy coming out of the right is based in centuries of racism coming from the myth that Black people are less than and by segregating the population, it’s keeping society better off.The key theme, though, is these people made things worse for everyone — they destroyed shared resources rather than share them because of these misguided beliefs.At the same time, most of what the left wing has been able to accomplish has been half assed and still more beneficial to the establishment.My solution would be to make all school funding come from the state rather than locality and prohibit booster programs and program targeted donations. School fund raisers should go to the state school board for equal distribution based on areal needs like per capita budgeting.I would like to see the department of education actually do something, but I would fear that bad actors like in the 2016–2020 administration would actually hamstring public schools…this is the single advantage to the delegation hierarchy of the United States — the damage is limited. Currently the DoE provides guidance, grants, and is the largest loan administrator in the country.Side note again — Part of the student loan crisis issue we’re facing today is because of Drained Pool politics. States used to subsidize higher education to a much greater degree, but when they had to include all people in these benefits, they shifted to making it a wealth investment — just another way of holding those that had no wealth built up generationally down.To answer your question, though, they wouldn’t have desegregated. Places that weren’t required to, still aren’t for the most part…In many ways, Little Rock is better off than Brooklyn in this regard.Footnotes[1] Week 1: Why America's Schools Have A Money Problem [2] Land and the roots of African-American poverty – Keri Leigh Merritt | Aeon Ideas[3] June 21, 1866: Southern Homestead Act - Zinn Education Project[4] RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings[5] A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America[6] White Flight Lives on in American Cities[7] Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project[8] Staggering Loss of Black Wealth Due to Subprime Scandal Continues Unabated[9] The Social Structure of Mortgage Discrimination[10] Black Americans unfairly targeted by banks before housing crisis, says ACLU[11] New evidence on school choice and racially segregated schools[12] Interview: How Policing in One US City Hurts Black and Poor Communities[13] 10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.[14] Harvard study finds institutional racism 'permeates' the Massachusetts justice system[15] Racial Profiling

Presumably this question refers to the Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, Whitford v. Gill (or in some sources Gill v. Whitford), which the SC will hear in October. The SC has already outlawed race-based gerrymandering.The plantiffs do not ask that all variations in partisan representation be banned, because the essence of democratic elections is that people can and do change their minds about whom to vote for, based on what issues, and parties can and do change in the issues and candidates they put forward. There are also provisions of law mandating districts in which minority groups have voting majorities.The SC agrees that partisan gerrymandering should be ruled unconstitutional. Four justices have favored doing it right away in previous cases, and four are against doing anything about it, claiming that the Constitution does not give the courts the authority to do so. The swing vote on this case is Justice Kennedy, who agrees that it should be ruled unconstitutional, but is only willing to do so if given a criterion for which gerrymanders go too far. That is precisely what plaintiffs in this case do.The new criterion is called the Efficiency Gap. It measures how many votes are ineffective in elections, either because they are cast for a losing candidate, or are above the 50%+1 needed to win. Then it compares the wasted votes on both sides.Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos & Eric M. McGhee, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap, 82 U. Chi. L. Rev. 831 (2015)How the Efficiency Gap WorksWe will have to discuss what numerical level is too much, and whether there are other circumstances that may affect that number in either direction. That discussion is well under way.Now, apart from these issues, it is still legal to gerrymander districts so that all incumbents have safe seats. This tends to feed the hyperpartisanship in Congress and many states.