The Best Way to Fix the Supreme Court’s Attack on Voting Rights |
The Best Way to Fix the Supreme Court’s Attack on Voting Rights
If U.S. electoral politics is going to survive the high court’s attack on equal rights, the game will have to change.
The Supreme Court’s decision this week to destroy what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 compels us to consider structural reforms to the court itself to preserve the republic. By giving a de facto blank check to Republican-led states to racially gerrymander Black Americans out of electoral power, the court has delegitimized itself and damaged the nation’s multiracial democracy.
Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, described Wednesday’s court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais as “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” Hasen, whose research was cited in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, is hardly a firebrand. He argued that Democrats must now “consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable.”
I agree. On racial and political gerrymandering in particular, however, there is another important reform that a Democratic Congress and president could also implement at the next opportunity: abolishing the House’s current system of single-member districts and electing members by proportional representation instead.
Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the “time, manner, and place” of federal elections. States administer elections within the bounds that Congress sets for them. For the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress allowed states a certain amount of discretion to devise their own electoral system, so long as it elected the apportioned number of representatives to the House. (The Senate, which would not become elected until the early twentieth century, is not at issue here.)
Many states adopted single-member districts. Under this method, which survives to this day, state lawmakers divide the state into congressional districts, each of which elects a single representative to the House. Like any electoral system, this approach has some benefits—greater regional diversity, direct constituent representation, and so on.
It also has some drawbacks. The most obvious of these is gerrymandering. The term derived its name from Elbridge Gerry, an early American statesman who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. His tenure coincided with the 1810 census and the reapportionment of House seats that occurs every 10 years. To maintain control of Massachusetts’s state legislature, Gerry’s fellow Democratic-Republicans drew an obviously manipulated map to maintain their majority. After Gerry signed the new map into law, Federalist denunciations ensured that the practice became forever associated with his name, to Gerry’s great consternation.
This is fairly rote stuff for high school American civics. What is less well known is that single-member districts weren’t the only method of electing House members in the early republic. One common alternative was known as a........