Supreme Court Decisions Impact MnCCE Work

By George Beck, MnCCE Chair

As you know by now the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two very important decisions on June 27th.  A majority of five judges held that federal judges could not consider the constitutionality of a state’s redistricting process since this was essentially a political decision. This means that state legislatures are free to draw election maps so they can favor the party in power and thus provide the party with more seats than the statewide vote actually would support. The record clearly indicated that maps were being drawn with the sole reason being to elect more of one political party. 

Wisconsin was not a party in either of the cases just considered, but, in Wisconsin in 2011, one party controlled the legislature and the governor’s office and the election maps for the 2012 election were gerrymandered. As a result, in 2012, Republicans had 49% of the votes statewide but ended up 61% of the state assembly. Many citizens were gerrymandered out of having their vote count in that election. This is simply a perversion of democracy and is not one person, one vote.

So what now? It’s back to the grassroots. There was a strong effort this past session to establish a commission to recommend to the legislature how to redistrict since it’s obvious that legislators have a clear conflict of interest. One proposal was included in the Omnibus Elections Bill that was passed by the MN House of Representatives. Unfortunately the Senate simply refused to hear the bill and would not consider it in the conference committee. Most Minnesotans support redistricting reform and the refusal to even consider reform means legislators are representing their political party or their contributors rather than their constituents. But the reform effort, supported by Clean Elections, will continue and may have a better result in 2021.

The U.S. Supreme Court also decided that the federal Commerce Department had not sufficiently justified the addition of a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census. Given the timeline for census preparation, this likely means that the question will not be included in the upcoming census.  No doubt the government will attempt to alter the timeline in hopes of rewriting its justification for the question, however.  The decision does not preclude the government from attempting to include a citizenship question at some point in the future.