Thank yous

Over the course of this project, I was helped by many different mentors. Each of them gave me guidance on what to study, and who else to talk to.

I want to give my sincerest thanks to:
Dominic Draye
Joseph Kanesfield
Kory Langhofer
Robert Rosenberger
Rory O'Sullivan

And my two amazing mentors:
Patrick Moore and Erik Clapeck

The Future of Gerrymandering: 2020

The wildly successful Republican partisan gerrymander (REDMAP) of 2010 will last three more years, after which time there will be a political brawl for control of redistricting. REDMAP cost about $30 million in campaign contributions (to ensure that Republicans controlled state legislatures and were therefore in charge of redistricting), but now the strategy's effectiveness is well known.

Both parties have started multiple super PACs to raise money for 2020 redistricting. This time, it is likely that over $100 million will be spent on 2020 state legislative campaigns.

One of the super PACs involved (the National Democratic Redistricting Committee) is part of President Obama's commitment to focusing on redistricting. Hopefully this PAC will work for redistricting reform, not just a shift in party control.

Most likely, 2020 will be a year of intense competition to control highly partisan gerrymandering. If our democracy is lucky, however, major reforms will start before that happens.

The Future of Polical Gerrymandering: The Wisconsin Case

As I have said before, the Supreme Court has been hesitant to deem political gerrymandering illegal, despite its acknowledgement that the practice is abominable. In fact, political gerrymandering has been used as an excuse for why a particular map is not racially gerrymandered. There is a correlation between race and party affiliation, in some places as great as 85% (minorities overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates). This means that often in racial gerrymandering cases, the best excuse is often, "this map was drawn for partisan advantage".

Whitford v. Nichol, a case expected to reach the supreme court later this year, could change all of that.

The case details a two part test for partisan gerrymandering. Part one is analyzing the efficiency gap (how many fewer votes a party could have received and still achieved the same electoral outcome). This shows if one party had its voters concentrated to its detriment. Part two is studying partisan bias (the difference in the number of seats that would be received by each party assuming both parties got 50% of the votes statewide).

This two part test is one of the best yet proposed for partisan gerrymandering. Depending on the Supreme Court's decision, this case could finally illegalize partisan gerrymandering.

REDMAP background

As I have hinted at before, the current legislative and congressional districts in this country are largely Republican-drawn. This is because of REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project). In 2010, a Republican super PAC spent $30 million on ads for specific state legislative races. This money, coupled with backlash to President Obama's administration, allowed Republicans to take control of most state legislatures.

The next step was drawing the maps. This was done by Republican operatives and experienced political cartographers. These maps were given to state legislators, who introduced and passed them into law.

REDMAP is the reason that the Republican party was able to maintain a majority in the US House despite getting fewer US House votes than the Democrats nationally. It is also the reason that the both congress and state legislatures are likely to remain in Republican hands until at least 2020.

The New Chicago School

Lawrence Lessig wrote The New Chicago School in 1998 as a response to an influential economic policy: The Chicago School. The older of these schools put forth the idea of law and economics, which said that regulation can be accomplished not just via laws, but also via economic incentives. The New Chicago School brought this further, adding in two additional regulation categories: social norms and architecture.

These ideas provide a helpful insight into possible redistricting reforms. While new laws may be the primary driver of redistricting reform, other types of regulation could help too.

Voters could financially support candidates and political advocacy groups who work towards redistricting reform.

People could decide that gerrymandering constitutes a type of corruption, and therefore make it the social norm to vote against legislators who engage in the practice.

Americans could consider the possibility of living among those with whom they disagree, making gerrymandering impossible architecturally. Right now, rural areas tend to be conservative, and cities vote liberal. Racial groups also tend to separate regionally. Creating more politically diverse communities would make it more difficult to undemocraticly group voters together by demographics.

Listening to Oral Arguements

Last week, I learned about another important aspect of studying the supreme court: oral arguments. I listened to audio recordings of the court discussing McRory v. Harris, a North Carolina Racial Gerrymandering case from earlier this year.

During oral arguments, lawyers for both the plaintiff and the defendant are given allotments of time to convince the judges that their sides are the most correct according to constitutional law and court precedent. The Justices interrupt sporadically to ask questions or express their opinions on certain arguments.

In McRory v. Harris, much of the discussion was based on precedent from an opinion written by Justice Kennedy. He interjected several times when the lawyers seemed to mischaracterize precedents he had set forth in the previous opinion.

Hearing these arguments provided interesting insights into how Justices make decisions and pick up ideas to put into their majority opinions.

The Direction of This Project from Now On

In the remaining weeks of this project, I will pursue three major categories of study.

The first will be a continuation of previous studies on the deontology/ utilitarianism debate. This will include a study of reflective equilibrium, as well as Lawrence Lessig’s essay, The New Chicago School. This category will discuss ways to balance the polarizing ideas of utilitarian philosophers (eg. Bentham and Mill) with the opposing ideas of deontologists like Kant.

The second category will be a philosophical spectrum that has not yet been introduced to this project: distributive justice. This will include ideas of Robert Nozick and John Rawls, with the aim of creating a framework for implementing the “good government” philosophies that I introduced with the utilitarianism/ deontology debate.

The third and final category of study will be current legal discussion of gerrymandering. It will include two racial gerrymandering cases from North Carolina, and a political gerrymandering case from Wisconsin. These cases are currently being argued at various levels within the Federal Court system, and they will therefore have significant implications for the future of gerrymandering in the 

United States.

This may not be the order with which I discuss these categories, but all will be addressed in detail. I hope you will continue to follow along with this blog.

Kant's Deontology

Immanuel Kant, in his 1785 book Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, describes a deontologist view of morals. He argues that a good will is the only thing that is inherently good. This means that all good actions must be the result of a good will.

He stresses this point by discussing maxims for living one’s life. Any maxim that is good to follow, Kant argues, must be good universally. If it were to be made into a universal law, it must not contradict itself.

This leads to the concept of the categorical imperative. This concept describes actions that are absolutely necessary without consideration to a specific end. Kant believes in the dignity of the individual, so one may have a duty to protect that dignity, even if such action will not succeed in achieving this goal. In other words, it is imperative that one completes the action, whether or not the action will lead to a desired result.

One of the best examples of applying this to redistricting would be the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Section 2 of this act creates a requirement for minority protection in redistricting (by creating majority-minority districts). These days, however, this can lead to a problem for minorities. Voters of a certain race can be packed together into one district in such a way that they have a reduced voice in government. Creating districts that are dominated by one racial group gives that group lots of political power in just a few districts, when they could have instead maintained significant influence in many districts.

Kant would not allow this problem to get in the way of legislation like the VRA. Despite creating a loophole that reduces minority representation, and thereby opposing its own intended purpose, the VRA would be necessary. Passing such legislation would be a categorical imperative.

Partisan Gerrymandering

While the Supreme Court has clearly shown to be both justiciable and illegal, the same is not true of an equally pernicious redistricting tactic: partisan gerrymandering. Although it is not perfectly defined, partisan gerrymandering tends to be the redrawing of district lines in such a way that one party may maximize the number of seats that it can take in election. This party will usually pack most of the opposing party’s voters in to just a few districts. The remaining districts often have similar numbers of voters from each party, carefully allocated so that the gerrymandering party secures narrow victories consistently.

Much like racial gerrymandering, partisan gerrymandering discriminates against certain voters and makes voting less democratic. The court (and therefore the law), however, views the two very differently.

In the last week, I read the Supreme Court opinions of four pivotal partisan gerrymandering cases. From all of these cases, it became clear that the court still has no metric to rule on partisan gerrymandering claims. Majority opinions have argued that certain metrics for evaluating these claims will not work, but no ruling has ever decided on a metric that does work. Such a metric will have to come from a future case.