Judge says Georgia's congressional and legislative districts are discriminatory and must be redrawn
Judge says Georgia's congressional and legislative districts are discriminatory and must be redrawn
A federal judge says some of Georgia’s congressional, state Senate and state House districts are racially discriminatory, ordering the state to draw an additional Black-majority congressional district.
This business of partisan redistricting and the judiciary telling states how many majority-minority district states need to have is unsustainable. We need a total overhaul. I think a single statewide multimember district with ranked choice voting would be ideal, and solve all of these issues in one swoop. A handful of multimember districts per state, like the Fair Representation Act proposes, would be acceptable too.
We need a constitutional convention and to dissolve Congress and form a parliament. Only then can this country progress.
It's way too early. We need to make sure Republicans can't hijack the process and make everything worse. Within the next decade or two, there should be enough of a shift to the left with Zoomers that Democrats have enough states and enough popularity to fix the Constitution without Republicans fucking it up.
Absolutely not. At least not now. The Right has been pushing for a constitutional convention for quite a while. Why? Because they can use the same techniques, disinformation and virtually unlimited dark money, on that that they use on elections. The Right wants to rewrite the constitution to suit themselves, and a constitutional convention would let them do it.
The only outcome from that, which by the way is being pushed for by billionaires, is proverbially putting a bullet in democracy's head and leaving it to rot in the desert.
What prevents all the corrupt, bad actors currently doing their best to fuck the system and all of us peons from doing the same but an order of magnitude worse once they get to rip up the constitution and start over?
What we really need is decent people to get together and agree on a general vision and goals of what needs unfucking.
We need a long game plan to fix things. Stuff like fixing broken congressional representation (Expand the House and bin the Senate), undo citizens united, break up oligopolies and monopolies, reform campaign finance and eliminate lobbying, do some form of ranked choice voting, no more electoral college, establish congressional term limits, and things along those lines.
The whole Senate thing needs to just fuck off. We need to re-architect checks and balances. Impeachment doesn't work. Voters should be able to recall any elected official.
Ideally but an easy fix would be to repeal the house apportionment act of 1929 and up the number of reps. Harder to gerrymander it all if there are far more reps to begin with. That and it doesn't need to touch voting methods, etc.
Your idea is far better. This one is just far more attainable in the short term.
I absolutely agree that we need a better system of running this country and am fully on board with all the listed policies.
However, It's only unsustainable if the American people have the balls to challenge it. I'm not exactly convinced of that when we as a country can barely say no to a blatant villain(Trump). Good change only happens when the people stubbornly demand it. I honestly can't remember a time in my lifetime where that has happened.
Instead, we get tiny morsels of change that are carefully doled out to keep us voting the 'right'TM way.
We are all just checked out escaping reality in our little bubbles expecting things to magically change. Oh, how I wish change worked like that. But sadly, It does not. If you want change, it takes the stubborn, unyielding willpower of forcing your position onto others continually.
And that is something we as a people have gradually forgotten. Unfortunately, the haters among us have not. They continually push their values onto others. They have worked to undermine abortion for 50+ years. And it worked and continues to work.
We have to out organize them to have any hope of things actually changing for the better. And it's a Hell of a lot easier to tear things apart than to improve them.
And yet you never hear about this happening in Texas, where the districts absolutely need to be redrawn to be more inclusive.
Judges, who are in the same political class as the legislature: "Looks fine to us."
Here's hoping MTG's district gets a whole lot more minorities...
GA-14 is already getting more and more diverse in the part that's in the Atlanta suburbs (Paulding and Cobb counties). But it definitely could get a whole lot more competitive next year.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Jones ordered Georgia’s Republican majority General Assembly and governor to take action before Dec. 8, saying he wouldn’t permit 2024 elections to go forward under the current maps.
The Georgia case is part of a wave of litigation after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year stood behind its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, rejecting a challenge to the law by Alabama.
Courts in Alabama and Florida ruled recently that Republican-led legislatures had unfairly diluted the voting power of Black residents.
Legal challenges to congressional districts are also ongoing in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
Jones wrote that he conducted a “thorough and sifting review” of the evidence in the case before concluding that Georgia violated the Voting Rights Act in enacting the current congressional and legislative maps.
He wrote that he “commends Georgia for the great strides that it has made to increase the political opportunities of Black voters in the 58 years” since that law was passed in 1965.
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