The state of Wisconsin does not choose its state legislature in free and fair elections, and it has not done so for a very long time. A new lawsuit, filed just one day after Democrats effectively gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, seeks to change that.
The suit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeks to reverse gerrymanders that have all-but-guaranteed Republican control of the state legislature — no matter which party Wisconsin voters supported in the last election.
In 2010, the Republican Party had its best performance in any recent federal election, gaining 63 seats in the US House of Representatives and making similar gains in many states. This election occurred right before a redistricting cycle, moreover — the Constitution requires every state to redraw its legislative maps every 10 years — so Republicans used their large majorities in many states to draw aggressive gerrymanders.
Indeed, Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander is so aggressive that it is practically impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature. In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats — just three seats short of the two-thirds supermajority Republicans would need to override a gubernatorial veto.
The judiciary, at both the state and federal levels, is complicit in this effort to lock Democrats out of power in Wisconsin. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), for example, the US Supreme Court held that no federal court may ever consider a lawsuit challenging a partisan gerrymander, overruling the Court’s previous decision in Davis v. Bandemer (1986).
Three years later, Wisconsin drew new maps which were still very favorable to Republicans, but that included an additional Black-majority district — raising the number of state assembly districts with a Black majority from six to seven. These new maps did not last long, however, because the US Supreme Court struck them down in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2022) due to concerns that these maps may have done too much to increase Black representation.
Go look up how the Senate and the House works. The separation of powers and the way the US government is organized is legitimately brilliant and it is all done on purpose to both limit power of any one part of government but also give individuals power in different ways and on different levels. One side represents a state as a whole because some issues affect an entire state, while the other side takes a state and breaks it up into districts because for other issues more local control is far better.
This is especially important for larger states or states with very varying areas (NYC is so vastly different than Utica). If I live in Utica, what happens in NYC is important simply because of the sheer size of the place both in population and wealth and industry and everything else. But for local issues me and my neighbors should be deciding what happens in our district. The layout of the US government covers both these issues.
You can shit on the way our government is run all you want, but the way it was set and organized is a different story. It is foolish to think a simple straight vote across the board is a good system.
I’m genuinely astonished that anyone can look at US history and call this organization of government a success.
Shitting on the US has become the new cool thing to do, so congrats on being a trendy edgel0rd.
And yet even as the US has become the world’s whipping boy for all its ills, EVERY time something happens around the world, everyone comes running to the US to solve its problems. They don’t run to China. They don’t run to the EU. They don’t run to Brazil or anywhere else.
War breaks out in the EU’s literal backyard, and yet the biggest support from Ukraine doesn’t come from its neighbors who would be most affected by a runaway Putin. Nope. The US is in there as soon as possible helping them out.
Earthquake hits some 3rd world country, and the US is shipping supplies before the ground stops shaking.
Pandemic spreads across the globe, and it’s not the UK or Japan leading the effort to donate vaccines.
Spare me the anti American rhetoric. It gets old and rather tiring to hear from clueless fucks who have a bone to pick.