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Supreme Court allows severe partisan gerrymandering to continue (1 Viewer)

pamak said:
If it does not affect the point why did you try to contest the point I made when I mentioned that the Maryland case was only about one district?
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Because the issue is that the federal courts ought not have the say.
 
pamak said:
The decision of Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 which changed the doctrine of "separate but equal" that was established by the SCOTUS in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was not based on any change in the Constitution between 1896 and 1954.

No amendments within that period was related to race in general or to the case of racial segregation specifically (List of amendments to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia).

If by your logic, the SCOTUS judges in the Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 had thought that change could not come in any way other than through a Constitutional Amendment preventing explicitly segregation, they would have chosen to rule in favor of keeping the segregation in US schools. Their interpretation of the Constitution is the one which is considered correct today. So, the idea that people should not debate the constitutional interpretation by the SCOTUS judges makes no sense unless these people feel insecure in defending the reasoning of such interpretation.
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????? Who is in charge of elections is spelled out in the constitution. Where kids go to schoool is not.
 
Athanasius68 said:
Which is because that is what the Constitution states --equality of the laws.
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A law which sends a white kid to one school and an identically situated black kid to a different school for no reason other than the color of their skin is INequality of the law by design.
 
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Jack Hays said:
The elections are not "cooked," whatever that means. They are competed in districts duly and lawfully drawn by the people's elected representatives.
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So were the elections in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Ngô Đình Diệm's Vietnam, Syngman Rhee's Korea, Noriega's Panama, and a whole lot of other places. Not only that, but the actual ballots cast were actually counted and the actual results actually recorded.
 
Jack Hays said:
I have no party and no interest at stake. And btw, one complaint before the court was about Republican gerrymandering (North Carolina) and the other was about Democratic gerrymandering (Maryland). I suggest you learn the facts before you post.
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Quite right, and the US Supreme Court could have done either of

  1. taken the position that "We don't give a damn how much you want to bugger up fair and equal representation and give the impression that your state is equivalent to some backwards third-world country where the elections are all 'legally rigged', so go ahead and do it because both parties are doing it."; or
  2. taken the position that "We don't give a damn how much you want to bugger up fair and equal representation and give the impression that your state is equivalent to some backwards third-world country where the elections are all 'legally rigged', AND we don't care that both parties are doing it, AND we don't care how long you have been doing it, BUT the case never got to us before so we never had a chance to rule on it and our ruling is that you can't do it any longer.".

Obviously the court chose to go with Option 1.
 
dixon01767 said:
A law which sends a white kid to one school and an identically situated black kid to a different school for no reason other than the color of their skin is INequality of the law by design.
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Not if the schools have equal facilities, budgets, and staff.

The problem with those "separate but equal" schools was that they all fulfilled the "separate" bit, but tended to do rather miserably on the "equal" bit. The argument that "High School A" is equal to "High School B" simply because they are both called a "High School" really didn't cut much ice.
 
dixon01767 said:
????? Who is in charge of elections is spelled out in the constitution. Where kids go to schoool is not.
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Again, anybody in charge of anything - from the federal government to legislation to the election or whatever - cannot just use his authority to do things that contradict constitutional principles. The Constitution is not a piece of paper designed to address every possible issue that a society is (or will) face. The Constitution gives the principles upon which ALL issues should be based .The Constitution NEVER spells out the word "privacy" but we do understand how privacy issues are linked to constitutional rights.
 
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TU Curmudgeon said:
So were the elections in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Ngô Đình Diệm's Vietnam, Syngman Rhee's Korea, Noriega's Panama, and a whole lot of other places. Not only that, but the actual ballots cast were actually counted and the actual results actually recorded.
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Yes, and . . . ?
 
TU Curmudgeon said:
Quite right, and the US Supreme Court could have done either of

  1. taken the position that "We don't give a damn how much you want to bugger up fair and equal representation and give the impression that your state is equivalent to some backwards third-world country where the elections are all 'legally rigged', so go ahead and do it because both parties are doing it."; or
  2. taken the position that "We don't give a damn how much you want to bugger up fair and equal representation and give the impression that your state is equivalent to some backwards third-world country where the elections are all 'legally rigged', AND we don't care that both parties are doing it, AND we don't care how long you have been doing it, BUT the case never got to us before so we never had a chance to rule on it and our ruling is that you can't do it any longer.".

Obviously the court chose to go with Option 1.
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IMHO the SCOTUS decided the case properly.
 
Athanasius68 said:
Which is because that is what the Constitution states --equality of the laws.
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So, you disagree with the rationale of Brown vs Education which says that it is inherently unequal to have states mandating that certain groups of people should be kept in different facilities from everybody else, even if such facilities are exactly identical to all others.

Predictable...and also a belief which has no place in modern societies. If you think that treating certain people like they have some type of a highly contagious disease linked to their skin color can be remedied by building for them facilities of equal value, you are mistaken.
 
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TU Curmudgeon said:
Not if the schools have equal facilities, budgets, and staff..
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No that would be two different schools. The constitution requires equal treatment under the law, not equal schools.
 
Jack Hays said:
Yes, and . . . ?
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Merely pointing out that slavish adherence to "form" (as you appear to be advocating) while ignoring "function" (as you also appear to be advocating) doesn't mean that a country has any justice or democratic form of government.

Those who backed (and derived personal benefit from) Hitler's government in Germany, Stalin's government in Russia, Ngô Đình Diệm's government in Vietnam, Syngman Rhee's government in Korea, and Noriega's government in Panama would be quite comfortable with your position.
 
pamak said:
So, you disagree with the rationale of Brown vs Education which says that it is inherently unequal to have states mandating that certain groups of people should be kept in different facilities from everybody else, even if such facilities are exactly identical to all others.
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One of the things that pushed Brown v. Board of Education to the conclusion that it did reach was that those "equal" facilities were simply NOT equal - despite the fact that the State government had (essentially) taken the public position that "All High Schools are equal." while its actual position was "All High Schools are equal, but some are more equal than others.".

pamak said:
Predictable...and also a belief which has no place in modern societies. If you think that treating certain people like they have some type of a highly contagious disease linked to their skin color can be remedied by building for them facilities of equal value, you are mistaken.
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But it IS a theory that still has a lot of adherents in some "modern societies" - isn't it?
 
dixon01767 said:
No that would be two different schools. The constitution requires equal treatment under the law, not equal schools.
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So if all of the "X" people go to a "High School" that has a per student budget of (for example) $1,000 per year and all of the "Y" people go to a "High School" that has a per student budget of (for example) $10,000 per year, they are being treated equally because BOTH the "X" people and the "Y" people go to a "High School".

Is that your position?
 
TU Curmudgeon said:
One of the things that pushed Brown v. Board of Education to the conclusion that it did reach was that those "equal" facilities were simply NOT equal - despite the fact that the State government had (essentially) taken the public position that "All High Schools are equal." while its actual position was "All High Schools are equal, but some are more equal than others.".



But it IS a theory that still has a lot of adherents in some "modern societies" - isn't it?
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That the equal facilities were not equal in practice is a given. But the decision went even farther ruling that separate but equal was inherently unequal by the fact of the separation itself.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka :: 347 U.S. 483 (1954) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center

(d) Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal. Pp. 493-494.

(e) The "separate but equal" doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, has no place in the field of public education. P. 495.


Of course, dissenters will always try to support new legal theories that match their beliefs and will try to create legal momentum to overturn unfavorable to them precedents This is a given and it does not matter if the dissenter is a racist who wants segregation today or a liberal who in 1954 wanted to change the legal doctrine of "separate but equal".
 
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TU Curmudgeon said:
Merely pointing out that slavish adherence to "form" (as you appear to be advocating) while ignoring "function" (as you also appear to be advocating) doesn't mean that a country has any justice or democratic form of government.

Those who backed (and derived personal benefit from) Hitler's government in Germany, Stalin's government in Russia, Ngô Đình Diệm's government in Vietnam, Syngman Rhee's government in Korea, and Noriega's government in Panama would be quite comfortable with your position.
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Those were governments with democratic forms without the substance. Not so here. What you criticize here is in fact the working out of democratic and Constitutional arrangements.
 
TU Curmudgeon said:
So if all of the "X" people go to a "High School" that has a per student budget of (for example) $1,000 per year and all of the "Y" people go to a "High School" that has a per student budget of (for example) $10,000 per year, they are being treated equally because BOTH the "X" people and the "Y" people go to a "High School".

Is that your position?
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Nope. Whats with the constant fishing for a strawman
 
pamak said:
That the equal facilities were not equal in practice is a given. But the decision went even farther ruling that separate but equal was inherently unequal by the fact of the separation itself.
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True, but if you take a step back and look at the financial realities (which I have no doubt the justices were fully aware of) it would NOT have been possible to actually "equalize" the facilities.

The only practical way to achieve an "equalization of educational opportunity" was to "equalize the students" (and that meant that some of the "X" students who had previously gone to the [higher quality, but state defined as "equal"] "X" schools had to go to the [lower quality, but state defined as "equal"] "Y" schools so that some of the "Y" students who had previously gone to the [lower quality, but state defined as "equal"] "Y" schools could to the [higher quality, but state defined as "equal"] "X" schools.

Naturally the parents of the "X" students who had gone to the [higher quality, but state defined as "equal"] "X" schools who then had to go to the [lower quality, but state defined as "equal"] "Y" schools were upset at the "terrible injustice being done to our children (by forcing them to pay for the evils of slavery)".
 
Jack Hays said:
Those were governments with democratic forms without the substance.
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Really? Wasn't the United States of America a big supporter of some of them? By my recollection it would have been three out of five.

Jack Hays said:
Not so here.
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Make that "Not so here - yet." and I agree with you.

Jack Hays said:
What you criticize here is in fact the working out of democratic and Constitutional arrangements.
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I suppose that "ensuring that, regardless of the actual popular will, your party will always win the elections" IS sort of "the working out of democratic and Constitutional arrangements".

You might want to consider

Criteria for determining boundaries

Each commission is required to divide the province into a specified number of electoral districts. The Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act requires that the population of each electoral district be as close as is reasonably possible to the average population size of a district for that province (that is, the province's population divided by the number of electoral districts).

However, in addition to population equality, commissions must consider other human and geographic factors. They may choose to create electoral districts whose populations vary from the average, if they consider it necessary or desirable to do so in order to:

  • respect communities of interest or identity (for example, communities based around language or shared culture and history),
  • respect historical patterns of previous electoral boundaries, or
  • maintain a manageable geographic size for districts in sparsely populated, rural or northern regions of the province.
Commissions should make every effort to ensure that the population of a district is not more than 25 percent above or below the average district population. In extraordinary circumstances, however, commissions may create districts that vary from the average by more than 25 percent.
​

and then tell me how that sort of an arrangement, which does NOT include any reference to "political leaning" would violate American's constitutional rights.
 
dixon01767 said:
Nope. Whats with the constant fishing for a strawman
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Just trying to get you to actually state a single consistent position.

You do realize that the (general) position of the State governments in the southern states was "As long as we call it a 'High School' then it is equal to any other facility that we call a 'High School' and the actual facilities and/or budgets of the 'High School' has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything because EACH OF THEM IS A 'High School'." - don't you?
 
TU Curmudgeon said:
Just trying to get you to actually state a single consistent position.
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Which part did you not understand? What inconsistency

dixon01767 said:
A law which sends a white kid to one school and an identically situated black kid to a different school for no reason other than the color of their skin is INequality of the law by design.
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Equal or unequal schools.
 
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