NOTHING BUT HEARTACHES (WHICH IS A SONG BY THE SUPREMES SO THIS IS A REFERENCE)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this past week in Rucho v. Common Cause is an endorsement of gerrymandering in all but actual wording. This is extremely bad for democracy, assuming you want representative democracy to work as it is ostensibly designed (IE, allowing people to vote for representatives, who will generally represent the will of the people in the legislature). On the other hand if you’re big on permanent rule by an entrenched minority it’s a great ruling.

Non-lawyers sometimes get a little stuck in the weeds on the reasoning in these cases, so let me put my lawyer hat on and explain. Gerrymandering - and this is the dime explanation here - is the act of drawing borders of representative districts so the overall electoral results will not actually be representative of the results of the popular vote. If your city votes 60% for Party A and 40% for Party B, it is possible to draw electoral districts so that the representatives that the city elects will be, say, 60% from Party B and 40% from Party A, by drawing district lines so that Party A’s votes are concentrated into fewer districts and B’s votes are spread out over the largest number of districts that they can still comfortably win most of the time. Or even more dramatic, as has happened in many American elections.

Gerrymandering is a very American phenomenon for the most part, because gerrymandering is most effective when you have both individually representative electoral districts (IE, a first-past-the-post system) and a two-party electoral system all but enshrined in law, and America is really the only country that does. (This isn’t to say that there aren’t examples of gerrymandering in other countries, but simply that America’s electoral system is more or less designed along principles that make gerrymandering brutally effective in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else.) And it is, of course, a complete subversion of the principles of electoral democracy.

In the United States, there’s a long lineage of both parties using gerrymandering to their own advantage on multiple occasions, but in the recent past it has become more and more pronounced as a particularly Republican and conservative tactic. This is not to proclaim that the Democrats are idealistic saints (some are, some aren’t), but the simple truth is that over time the Democrats have had fewer opportunities to gerrymander, mostly because gerrymandering is less effective in urban areas and Democrats pull most of their votes from cities, and when you have a diverse voter base, like the Democrats do, much of your base will generally be opposed to targeting voters of specific backgrounds (which is what gerrymandering basically is) because they might be next.

Anyway, because it’s become a conservative tactic, liberals and lefties have been suing to overturn gerrymandering initiatives when they happen at the state level, and this week’s ruling in Rucho is basically a kneecapping of all of these lawsuits (which were previously mostly successful at lower levels in the courts, because their merit was fairly obvious). The Roberts Court ruled 5-4 in a straight “conservatives versus liberals” vote that although gerrymandering district plans can be struck down by the courts, they can only be struck down if the courts deem them to explicitly target voters based on protected class (IE, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, that sort of thing). Otherwise the complaint is “political” and not appropriate for the courts to overrule, and should be addressed politically (IE, by changing the gerrymandering in the legislature).

This is bullshit for several reasons. Firstly, the idea that the way to deal with electoral districts expressly designed to favor one party is via the legislature, which the aforementioned party will control as a result of the gerrymandering, is stupid on its face. Secondly, as politics grows more tribal and partisan in nature, the difference between discriminating based on protected class and discriminating based on political affiliation becomes less and less meaningful. (“But you can always vote for the other guy” is a useless sentiment when “the other guy” is openly hostile to you and people like you - or, at least, if you perceive them to be such.)

And thirdly, it’s bullshit because last year, in Trump v. Hawaii - which you might better know if I call it “the Muslim travel ban case” - the Roberts Court, again on a 5-4 conservative/liberal ruling, upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban while simultaneously overruling Korematsu v. United States, the famous ruling that upheld the government’s right to intern Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II - and which was still good law until last year because it had never been overruled. In order to do this, they distinguished Trump’s Muslim travel ban from Korematsu by saying that Japanese internment camps were designed “solely and explicitly on the basis of race,” wheras the travel ban was a “facially neutral policy” because instead of targeting all Muslims, it instead only targeted travellers from mostly-Muslim countries. In short, the Roberts Court’s essential basis for upholding the Muslim travel ban was that it had been successfully cloaked in a wink-and-a-nod.

This is part and parcel of modern American conservative jurisprudence. Numerous right-wing judges have ruled repeatedly that the standard for determining if governmental action or racist should be according to a “clearest proof” standard, which essentially demands that discriminatory activity be accompanied by the most obviously cartoonish racism one can imagine, and in turn makes any racist activity which can be given a reasonable ulterior motive unassailable by the courts.

And, frankly, most of them don’t even need that. This week also saw the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Justice v. New York, the “citizenship census question case.” Long story short: the federal government wanted to add a question to the 2020 census: “are you an American citizen?” This was specifically wanted because census data apportions federal representation on total population, not total voter population, and since immigrants tend to cluster in Democratic states and because asking immigrants if they’re citizens or not depresses census response information, Republicans wanted to add the question because they specifically believed it could help depress population counts in Democratic states. When I say “Republicans did this,” please understand that I say that because there is ample evidence of them deciding this in the judicial record, and that the Republicans lied about the existence of this evidence in court. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to prevent the question from being added, with Roberts joining the liberal members of the court in that preventing vote, but Roberts specifically noted in his opinion that the government could try to add such a question in future. In short, he basically told the federal government to give him a better excuse to let it slide next time.

So, yeah. The American Supreme Court is currently engaged in a full-on attack on democratic principles. That’s swell.

GEE, TWENTY MUCH?

The G20 summits is happening right now and because there is a lot of stupid dippy photo-op shit that happens at G20 summits a lot of people tune them out except for whatever silly thing (or massive protest) makes the news at any given summit. This time around the silly thing looks to be how world leaders were blatantly disrespecting Ivanka Trump, because she’s not actually important to them and has nothing meaningful to say to them so why would they care about her, exactly? (Canada Proud, the political action group astroturfing for the Tories, wants the silly thing to be “Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro refuses to shake Justin Trudeau’s hand” except if you look at the original footage and not the footage they edited, what happens is that Trudeau gestures at someone else who clearly wants to greet Bolsonaro and whom Bolsonaro doesn’t see, Bolsonaro turns to that guy and shakes their hand, and then turns back and shakes Trudeau’s hand.)

But stuff does happen at these things. The USA clearly wants the G20 summit to be an opportunity to restart trade negotiations with China. China, on the other hand, is trying to use the G20 summit to get countries to agree to the general principle of “respecting national sovereignty,” which is code for “I get to do to my citizens whatever you like and you’re not allowed to get mad.” Getting Russia on board with this, as Xi Jinping did, is not surprising. Getting Jair Bolsonaro or Mohammed Bin Salman on board isn’t that surprising either. Getting Narendra Modi of India on board maybe isn’t technically surprising (given what I’ve written about Modi in the past), but it’s definitely ominous.

On the less evil side of things, Japan and the EU are clearly pushing for more climate change international treaty work, international co-operation on dealing with internet megaliths and their ability to evade liability by multinational activity, pushing China to give Hong Kong more autonomy, and a bunch of other policy briefs that might get troublesome in the specific once multinational corporations step in to exert their influence, but in the general (and everything is general right now, that’s really the point of the G20) they’re mostly ideas you want to see countries co-operating on. This is mostly what usually happens at these summits: the laying of groundwork for future international agreement. Which is a bit boring, but the sausage always gets made somewhere.

THINGS DID NOT GET BETTER IN SUDAN THIS WEEK

I keep putting off writing about Sudan because it keeps looking like things are winding down and then they unwind again so let’s write about Sudan, I guess.

Back in December, Sudan started seeing massive protests against Omar Al-Bashir, who has been the president of Sudan for the past thirty years and who has almost certainly never won a fair election in Sudan, but who has definitely won a lot of unfair ones. (He also came into power via a military coup so, really…) Since he was President for the past thirty years, the quicker studies among you have probably already realized (if you didn’t already know) that he was President during the Second Sudanese Civil War (which ultimately resulted in the creation of South Sudan) and also during the genocide in Darfur. So he’s kind of a shithead and protests against him were totally understandable, and Al-Bashir ordering troops to open fire on protestors is also totally understandable in the “I understand that shitheads do shithead things” sense.

Anyway, the protests continued and in April the military finally stepped in and kicked Al-Bashir out of office and set up a “Transitional Military Council” to run the country until they had elections, and initially things were going well enough, but then the protestors started protesting again just to make sure the military knew they were serious, and at first the military kept co-operating with the protestors but eventually in early June they killed 118 people in Khartoum and it looked like everything was going to go to hell, but in mid-June things seemed to be ratcheting down again as the protestors and military re-engaged with one another and started planning a new transitional government that would have civilian and military representatives, but then the military banned Al-Jazeera from reporting and arrested a bunch of protestors they claimed were “plotting coups” against the current military government and raided the headquarters of the Sudanese Professionals Association (a large group of unions and trade guilds, representing a lot of the Sudanese middle class) because the SPA had co-operated with the protestors and then this past weekend protestors marched across Sudan and across Sudan the army shot at them again. So far the count is seven dead, but that’s the government’s number and realistically it’s probably higher.

I have no pithy summary of what happens next, because honestly, I have no idea. Sudan is a country that’s been under de facto military rule for basically its whole existence - either directly or by tacit permission - and what we’re seeing with the protestors is essentially unprecedented in Sudan: the entire country demanding an actual civil democracy instead of just another stratocracy. (That is the Greek-root word for “rule by the military.” I had to look it up. You’re welcome.) Nobody knows what happens next, but the end route is either “the military caves” or “the military keeps hammering people until they submit to power.” No idea which.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Iron Man (2008, Jon Favreau, Blu-Ray) - 3.5/5

High Flying Bird (2019, Steven Soderbergh, Netflix) - 4.5/5

Lilo and Stitch (2002, Chris Sanders/Dean DeBlois) - 4/5

We also finished The Terror, which was excellent and thoroughly tense, and after it and Chernobyl I wonder if Jared Harris isn’t just gonna do a romcom so people don’t automatically butt-clench when he enters a room. Also, after all that nautical-ness, I tried out Nantucket on Steam and it’s a pretty good nautical adventure sort of a game. Boats! They’re exciting!

See you in seven.