The California Supreme Court will not prevent Democrats from moving forward Thursday with a plan to redraw congressional districts.
Republicans in the Golden State had asked the state’s high court to step in and temporarily block the redistricting efforts, arguing that Democrats — who are racing to put the plan on the ballot later this year — had skirted a rule requiring state lawmakers to wait at least 30 days before passing newly introduced legislation.
But in a ruling late Wednesday, the court declined to act, writing that the Republican state lawmakers who filed the suit had “failed to meet their burden of establishing a basis for relief at this time.”
The supreme court denied the republican’s claim that democrats didn’t wait 30 days before passing the legislation.
Democrats used the technique of “editing” an existing bill by replacing all the text. Its not technically new legislation, its an edit, which doesn’t require 30 days before passage. Clearly against the spirit but not letter of that rule.
Courts can only rule on things they are asked to rule on. The court declined to stop the bill based on the specific procedural issue in this case. The court did not rule on the merits of the redistricting law itself. There will surely be more judgments in future
Democrats used the technique of “editing” an existing bill by replacing all the text. Its not technically new legislation, its an edit, which doesn’t require 30 days before passage. Clearly against the spirit but not letter of that rule.
The national Congress pulls this trick regularly, also in order to get around rules limiting the speed at which legislation can be introduced. I believe the PPACA was passed out of the body of another bill, after Republicans tried to use calendaring rules to obstruct the legislation, back in 2010. One of the bigger tax bills - either Trump’s or Bush’s, I can’t recall - was passed in a similar manner.
Maybe we’ll see a federal court block this on a technicality, but if they do it would be a huge shift in how legislation is moved in the face of minority obstruction.
The federal legislature is one of the worst. They do a ton of awful shenanigans. I would support a constitutional amendment to ban all of those practices.
Bills can have only one subject. The subject needs to be the title. The title cannot be changed.
Those three rules block at least 90% of federal legislative nonsense.
Bills can have only one subject. The subject needs to be the title. The title cannot be changed.
And perhaps the title should be what the bill actually is
For example something like “Freedom for American Internet Choice”
Which likely removes regulation or restriction on a company being a monopoly because the “Freedom” is who can bribe the most and lobby against possible commercial or municipal competition.
There’s plenty of bills like that where the title is incredibly misleading, on purpose, to get people who don’t care to do any research to wonder “why would anybody be against freedom?”
Yes, that is what that line means. Washington has very similar language in their constitution and it blocks a lot of shenanigans.
My favorite is “Freedom to Work Act”
Oh that sounds ni… Oh it’s a bill to allow employers to fire you for any reason or no reason at all, and you have no recourse…
This particular strain of nonsense, certainly.
But, at some level, the legislature governs as it wills. You can’t constrain people with rules when they write and interpret and enforce the rules internally. All the judiciary can do is object to the actions and hope the bureaucracy responds in kind. Judges have no enforcement capacity (partially by design).
The only real way to block legislative nonsense is to grant Judges a hand in selecting/promoting/recalling executive and legislative bureaucrats. And given the current state of the federal judiciary, I can imagine a lot of reasons why liberals would hate that idea.
Often called “zombie bills”… Georgia Republicans do it all the time.
Letter of the law has effectively (and unfortunately) been the law of the land for some time now, the only time judges try to consider the “spirit” of the law these days is when they are corrupt and trying to skew their decisions a certain way while claiming to be impartial.
I have no qualms with people trying to use that fact to maintain the power of the people when we are up against fascists thugs who disregard all laws, spirit or written, whenever it suits them. Fuck them.
Abolish arbitrary districts. Towards Proportional Representation.
Well, they did it in Texas so now we’ll all loose more control with our votes. I know its retaliatory and probably necessary for blue states, but in the long run it will get worse for votes to count. Easy to say and but hard to do, but we need to get rid of land having the power to vote and have the vote of the people count. Rich people own more land anyways and shouldn’t have more control.
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Begining of the end? Nah, these seeds were planted by Nixon, they sprouted under Reagan, Bush watered them, Trump is just harvesting them.
Realistically, Clinton, Obama, and Biden watered them too, just not as generously.
California knows it’s not ideal, which is why it has an expiration date when it would have to be voted in again by the people (unlike in Texas). Have to fight fire with fire or you lose before you even start.
We are headed for another civil war.
What’s better, civil war or Fourth Reich?
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Remember the billionaires are trying to speed run this so they can buy people.
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Hypocracy abound if the California Supreme Court did that. Coming off as “impartial” would mean turning an eye as only sanctioning Republicans while denying Democrats clearly is hypocracy at its finest.
The courts probably fear their legitimacy being unrecognized fully if they go this route.
Actually, the supreme courts of Texas and California are separate and distinct from each other.
Texas courts failing to stop partisan gerrymandering aimed at political parties choosing their voters rather than the other way around wouldn’t make it hypocritical for those in California to protect the concept of “one person, one vote”.
If anyone is being hypocritical here, it’s Mike Johnson (for being against California doing it but for Texas doing it) and zero sum Democrats (for being against Texas doing it but not against California doing it) with no regard for the damage to representative democracy and any third party or independent candidates trying to take on the Neoliberal behemoth that is the California DNC from the left.
It’s the California state court, stacked with California liberal judges, who are all aligned with the majority Democratic Party. I’m not shocked to see them rule in the state legislature’s favor.
More interested in seeing if a federal court, stacked with more conservative judges, chooses to intervene.
Now there is a path of escalation I had no anticipated. The Republican federal judges rule the cali maps unconstituonal, Cali goes forward anyway because the 10th amendment and that ruling is patent bullshit. Then Republicans refuse to seat the Cali delegation to Congress, essentially seizing power.
That would set the hair of neoliberals on fire.
Autocrat, Democrat, Hypocrat?
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Thanks, Obamacrat
Good.
Can someone explain to me how this matters? Do republicans really think they will take California? Many of the reds there already moved to Texas.
It means fewer Republican representatives from California in Congress. They’re doing it to match the number of Democratic seats Texas is going to gerrymander out of their state.
But congress doesn’t actually do anything anymore. King Trump holds all the power and as it stands now, congress is mostly ceremonial.
Because the Democrats are the minority. If they pick up 3 or 4 seats in the midterms, they can actually do something about it
Reminds me of 2018
That dem majority really turned things around…
Surely giving up and trying nothing will turn things around!
/s
Lol
Even blocking his agenda is something.
It’s going to take a lot more than a slim majority to do what needs to be done.
And your counter suggestion is what, rolling over?
The only thing that solves fascism is incredible violence. There’s just no way to get enough people to act yet. It will happen when people run out of reasons to comply with laws that only apply to them, but theres going to be a lot of suffering and misery inflicted on us all before enough people say fuck it and grab a brick.
The only thing that solves fascism is incredible violence.
That’s not exactly true.
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The deposition of the Greek junta in 1974 resulted in the deaths of 24 protestors (estimated) at the hands of a fascist tank, but no large-scale violence broke out. Infighting within the junta and the junta’s invasion of Cyprus caused far more death than the revolution did.
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The Carnation Revolution in Portugal that same year only resulted in 4-6 deaths, total, all caused by the reaction of the regime being overthrown; no one was killed by the revolutionaries.
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In Spain, just a year later, Francisco Franco died of natural causes; and while I wouldn’t call what happened over the next few years “peaceful,” it wasn’t quite two years from the death of Franco to the new government’s first successful election, and that time wasn’t marked by anything I would call “incredible violence.”
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Uruguay transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy in the mid-1980s. It was a little over a year between the first General Strike and the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president of the new government (though some elements of democracy had been filtering back into the government for the previous few years). No one was killed by the anti-fascists.
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Pinochet’s incredibly violent rule in Chile ended with an election and a peaceful (albeit extended) transfer of power between 1988-1990.
Today, all of these countries have a score of 85 or higher on the Freedom House index.
There are other similar examples: Argentina in 1982, the Philippines and the People Power Revolution in 1986, South Africa defeating apartheid in 1994, even South Korea last December. Not all of those are great examples, whether because they didn’t stand the test of time or because they weren’t “quite as bad” to start off with, but it certainly seems that in the modern era, defeating fascism can be done nonviolently.
Will it be done nonviolently in the US? I don’t know. All I know is, every fascist regime in history has either fallen or is in the process of falling. It’s just a matter of time, and how many people die along the way.
theres going to be a lot of suffering and misery inflicted on us all
Definitely true. One way or the other, this isn’t going to be a fun time.
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