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Dulcinea

(9,402 posts)
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 07:30 AM Aug 2025

Chief Justice John Roberts enabled Texas' gambit to gerrymander the state for the GOP

(CNN) The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas, with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states, was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court, declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.

Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts – drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests – to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chief-justice-john-roberts-enabled-115326184.html

9 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Chief Justice John Roberts enabled Texas' gambit to gerrymander the state for the GOP (Original Post) Dulcinea Aug 2025 OP
Roberts Abstractartist Aug 2025 #1
Please include his repulsive, partisan hack wife too wolfie001 Aug 2025 #5
Roberts is the regime's chief Justice. bronxiteforever Aug 2025 #2
FJR DoBW Aug 2025 #3
Little Johnny Applecheeks is a fucking fraud. 11 Bravo Aug 2025 #4
"Balls and strikes"..........Oh, really? wolfie001 Aug 2025 #6
There's a special place in hell for John Roberts. He's doing the devil's work by enabling these fascist mofos. BComplex Aug 2025 #7
needs to be put under oath Skittles Aug 2025 #9
The predicate for this is much more recent. Igel Aug 2025 #8

Abstractartist

(377 posts)
1. Roberts
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 08:15 AM
Aug 2025

Roberts lost all integrity and he knows his future history legacy is totally fucked now. I’m thinking he is going down as the worst chief justice appointed and I personally can’t wait for all the right wing zealots on the court to kick off.

bronxiteforever

(10,900 posts)
2. Roberts is the regime's chief Justice.
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 09:43 AM
Aug 2025

Last edited Tue Aug 5, 2025, 10:21 AM - Edit history (1)

He and his stolen majority have destroyed so much of my Country. A pox on him.

11 Bravo

(24,229 posts)
4. Little Johnny Applecheeks is a fucking fraud.
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 10:18 AM
Aug 2025

And he has done so much damage to the causes of basic human and civil rights, that I can only take a tiny bit of a solace in the fact that the two things most important to him - his reputation as an impartial jurist, and that of the SCOTUS he heads as having served as an unbiased arbiter of the cases that come before it - are both right down the shitter.

BComplex

(9,660 posts)
7. There's a special place in hell for John Roberts. He's doing the devil's work by enabling these fascist mofos.
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 01:02 PM
Aug 2025

He needs to be brought up on charges of treason.

Skittles

(168,406 posts)
9. needs to be put under oath
Wed Aug 6, 2025, 02:12 AM
Aug 2025

and asked WHY he is pimping for Trump instead of working for WE THE PEOPLE

Igel

(37,191 posts)
8. The predicate for this is much more recent.
Tue Aug 5, 2025, 08:04 PM
Aug 2025
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/01/texas-congressional-redistricting-doj-coalition-districts/

Four of Texas’ congressional districts were unconstitutional, the department warned. Three, the 9th, 18th and 33rd, were unconstitutional “coalition districts,” where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. The 29th, while majority Hispanic, was also unconstitutional, the letter said, because it was created by its two neighbors being coalition districts.


This was a case from 2024, Petteway v Galveston. The issue was whether a district created in 2021 that abolished a long-standing majority minority district was permitted.

The VRA section 2 does not, the courts ultimately opined, mandate coalition voting districts. That is, if a district is 26% Latino, 28% black, combing them into a district that was at least 54% minority was not mandated. In fact, it was argued that this could constitute an improper dilution of both the black and Latino voting populations. Notice that the recent DOJ missive to TX is precisely based on this.

I'm not sure that the decision reached declared coalition minority majority districts unconstitutional. The underlying claim, sometimes heard but seldom via left-of-center sources, is that this constitutes a new legal basis permitting--if not requiring--boundaries be redrawn since the basis for their existence, the need to comply with race-based gerrymandering to comply with the VRA section 2 was voided. (Note that gerrymandering is sometimes required for reasons of race.)

The older case said that partisan gerrymandering was okay, but race-based gerrymandering that wasn't mandated was barred. Given that that often race correlated with party affiliation, it often appeared to be race-based. It's problematic, and you're left with assuming ill intent unless proven otherwise, versus okay intent until proven otherwise.
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