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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Redistricting fight

It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.

Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.

Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against

Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.

The Princeton site does have individual report card data in JSON format. There is a download button slightly inconspicuous.

How gerrymandered is difficult to score in a single metric, but the largest tell tail is probably a step jump in the "District by average partisan win percentage" chart. It is evidence that the districts are being arranged to isolate one party in fewer districts. Especially if the jump spans the "competitive" line. Shape irregularity is the most common "look at this map it must be gerrymandered," but is not a necessary or sufficient condition to show a map is gerrymandered. That video cites openprecincts(dot)org, but it seems to be down now.

Some of the step jumps are also simply the results of people "gerrymandering" themselves. e.g. Drawing a box around metro-Miami could be chosen based off of pure geographic considerations, but if all the Ds in Florida move to Miami they have secured on "safe" district but given up contesting every other district. It seems this a natural result of choosing to draw the boundaries based on geography, but there being clear partisan differences in geographic distribution. Maybe someone has a clear counter example, but shouldn't there be a trivial lemma as a result of Arrow's impossibility theorem where you just substitute candidates with candidate map. Essentially saying there is not perfectly "fair" map. Or if you substitute candidate representation system for candidates to show that there is no perfectly "fair" representative system.

Edit: To add an example of why you can't just take the grade from Princeton. VA gets an A because it is fair in the sense of proportionate. The jump around the competitive zone on the average partisan win percentage chart is still there. This is probably so that the vote is proportionate for court intervention prevention, but locks in a strong gerrymandered incumbency advantage.

The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue

Evidence for this?

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Note that California's process in particular was enacted in 2008, opposed by the democratic party and supported by the Republican party, but they shot themselves in the foot and lost several seats. calling California "dumb" for this is probably ignoring a lot of path dependency and/or requires applying some double standards.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.

But I know how much those hopes are worth.

Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.

Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.

In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).

Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.

Texas wasn’t that gerrymandered before this. In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period.

It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.

Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.

Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.

To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.

There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count

I don't think this is right - people get extremely mad if they feel their vote is being taken away. What I think is true is that very few people have a sense for the details of politics. They want to show up once every 2-4 years and vote for someone they vibe with and otherwise not think too hard about the substance of policy.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up

In addition to the point I raised above, these meetings are often contrived to be difficult to attend and your individual participation is not particularly meaningful. Showing up as an organized group does have an impact (which is why these processes are often dominated by small groups of angry retirees), but that's contrary the central tenet of neogrillism, i.e. only absolutely minimum effort participation in the political process.

But as long as they get to vote, sure they argue about politics but, at least from my personal observation, the participation is mostly about feeling as if they participate, and very little about outcomes and certainly not about what happens after they vote. Like if they get little of what the6 say they want, sure they grouse, but it’s not like they’ll do much more than tantrum on social media and talk about lying politicians. So the median American “votes”, fails every time to get politicians to do what they actually want done … and are mostly perfectly okay with it. That’s not “caring about the vote” so much as “caring that they get to cast a ballot every couple of years.” Which is different, and furthermore doesn’t bode well for the predictions that people will get upset about their district being rendered non competitive. They still get the parts they care about: the process of casting a ballot, the ability to complain, the constant need to stay informed so “they know how they should vote.” The only part missing is the steering wheel being connected to the wheels. It’s like those little car-seat steering wheels kids have. The kid is perfectly content with turning the little wheel and couldn’t give a care that it doesn’t do anything to the car.

And really, for most human behavior, the truism holds that if a person really truly cares about something, they’ll find a way to do it. If they really cared about local politics, they’d find ways to participate, it’s not impossible. Yet nobody cares about that stuff.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.

People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.

The number of people who don't show up because they think it will be ineffectual (I somewhat agree) is dwarfed by the number of people who don't show up because they don't really care. Because however ineffectual it is, it's still more effectual than updating a profile pic with a slogan, retweeting something, or liking a TikTok short, which far more people do.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand? The norm goes into the shredder when the first side defects, not when the patsy notices and finally decides to fight back.

To be fair, mid decade redistricting is, while definitely signaled well in advance, not very precedented.

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand?

The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.

Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.

Characterizing Texas' current actions as "a patsy finally noticing and fighting back" is a-historical nonsense im afraid. Republicans have had their share of innovation in the gerrymandering space. See operation REDMAP.

You say that the Dems clearly started it. Others says the Reps clearly started it.

Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.

I read something on TheMotte that appears to be well-argued, some guy replies with what appears to be an equally compelling argument, and some other website has information that contradicts them both. My brain feels like it's going to explode. There is no hope.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting. Sweep away the decades of bullshit. Make everyone fight for their seats.

Divorcing redistricting from the census is going in the wrong direction. It is strictly worse to have the winners of each election clamoring to entrench their lead. But Trump and Newsom think they can score some points by mashing the big Defect button, so that’s what we get. It’s like calling a snap election. It’s chicanery.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting.

Several states have "independent" committees to draw district lines, but still manage to have drastic swings between party votes (let's use "votes for presidential candidate from each party" as a good, but imperfect proxy) and congressional representation. California comes to mind, but certainly isn't alone. I've even seen this defended with "but reds choose to live in dense blue areas, so we can't draw lines to create majority-red districts". Note that the Civil Rights Act requires, and we manage to generally, draw districts that are majority-minority (Q: if neighborhoods broadly ever become effectively non-segregated, can we throw up our hands and say this isn't possible?). The Louisiana SCOTUS case recently included peripheral questions about whether two disconnected historically-Black areas (one urban, one rural) could reasonably be drawn into the same district for this purpose.

Honestly, I've come to the opinion that in this day and age, good geographic district boundaries just aren't a solvable problem, and that we should probably move to proportional slates of candidates by state like some parliamentary systems do. This has its own problems, but I think if limited to one house of Congress would balance reasonably well. Pity that existing law disallows such schemes, I believe.

Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.

One of my more unhinged pet ideas for the house is that the the main problem with Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem are the requirements for a deterministic process.

In my fantasy each voter would be able to nominate one person to serve in the House for a two year term. You would then select 2,500 ballots to establish the house for the next two years, continuing to select random ballots one at a time in the case of duplicates. No one would be guaranteed incumbency, so you couldn't trade as much on future electoral success. Very popular politicians would still be more likely but not guaranteed a spot, so they would also have to maintain a real job or do a good enough job to maintain influence even when not in power. With a 2,500 strong body crazies should be a small enough minority, on an given issue, to be safely ignored. And if the sample is random you would have enough statistical representation to match the populace to within 1% on any given topic, even tighter if things are not 50/50. The idea would be that the majority go back to their regular life after serving.

Leave the institutional knowledge building and statesmanship to the Senate.

Article going into detail on this topic

AMENDMENT XXXI: There shall be not less than one Representative for every thirty thousand persons, and not more than one Representative for every twenty-five thousand persons.

I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.

Norm. LOL. Here is the New Jersey map. District 10 is a triskellion. District 6 is your classic salamander. District 3 for some reason has a dagger through the heart of Monmouth County. District 11 is a Republican area plus just enough of deep blue Essex to flip it Democratic. And District 8 is just WTF.

The only "norm" broken here is the Republicans are doing it loudly instead of the Democrats in a back room.

We don't have to go back far in time to find a situation where NJ was roughly 50-50 in party congressional seats (2014 and 2016). The big swing towards Democrats happened in 2018, but new maps were not drawn until 2021, so partisan gerrymandering could not have played a role there.

the previous district map was drawn in 2011 by a bi partisan committee, in which a Republican cast the tie-breaking vote.

Looking at the two maps, one is not clearly more gerrymandered than the other.

So my conclusion is that regardless of how squiggly lines on the map are, Republicans have historically been proportionally competitive in nj-- so the squigglyness tells us little.

Of course cherry picking squiggly districts is orthogonal to the question of whether Republicans in this specific case are smashing the 'defect' button and trying to pick up extra house seats 'for free' . (They definitely are.)

You've provided a map without much context with regards to population or voting demographics, so in the absence of that information the map doesn't demonstrate much of anything about the prevalence of gerrymandering

Gerrymandering as a term dates to 1812. Some gerrymanders are more egregious than others, but the practice is very hard to expunge. It’s also limited by the fact that the canvas these districts are painted on, and the political parties themselves, are ever-shifting. A gerrymander can only ever be a temporary success. If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch. That’s how it’s always been.

I’d relax about this particular problem. Unless your specific qualm is that you’re a Democrat in Texas and are worried about being disenfranchised. In that case I fully understand your concern and would recommend you view it as a personal issue (and move states) or a local issue (and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform). I wouldn’t think of this as the end of Democracy in America. It’s just the usual political grift. Unpleasant but sustainable.

I can buy the argument that the specific shape of a district matters less over time as people re-assort themselves. The corollary to this is that what does matter is the cycle-to-cycle changes in the districts. But on this basis, Texas' current actions are more likely to be a unilateral defection versus a tit-for-tat against previous democratic actions.

Also, if the district maps can be drawn at the whims of the legislature then the incumbent party can in general continuously redraw the map to maintain their advantage. This hurts your argument that everything will equalize eventually. The only way to prevent that is a norm that says "redistricting with the purposes of consolidating partisan advantage is bad". But your argument is the opposite of this.

My argument is effectively that trying to secure power in a democracy through anything other than pleasing the majority of constituents is eventually opposed to its own goal. If you can get away with pleasing your constituents less by virtue of a gerrymander, then they will come to distrust you. If they distrust you, your voterbase will erode out from under the gerrymander, and when the dam bursts you will be in real trouble. The one-party democratic systems, like in Singapore and Japan, are obsessed with pleasing the majority of constituents and use the opposition parties as ways to find areas where they are falling behind public opinion. That’s the heart of it.

Worried about? Ha. Ha ha.

Any plan which relies on our state Democrats is probably less effective than shooting myself. At least with that strategy, I’d reduce our share of the next census.

Gerrymandering every four years instead of every ten is obviously not the end of democracy. It’s just another thing made shittier to score a couple points in the here and now. You’d think I might be used to it by now.

State democrats are very effective at turning money into pointless drama, much moreso than shooting yourself.

If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch.

Gerrymandering is sustainable in the sense it's not a catastrophic disruption to the function of government. It is still less than ideal. Safe seats lead to more important primaries which leads to more important primary voters. Primary voters skew radical, older, and more influenced by interests. It is poorly representative practice, but not in any positive "the King knows best" sort of way.

The pendulum is a comforting idea. It's also not an Iron Law of democracy. Political machines entrench themselves and last much longer than they should because people don't successfully organize to take them down a notch. Chicago has been poorly governed by a political machine for a long time. I consider competition closer to an Iron Law of Good in democracy, and gerrymandering reduces it.

That said, if we want to stop arguing about gerrymandering we need a new system. I'd choose a limited form of proportional representation for the house. Limit the number of parties represented with thresholds to preclude 1% parties. I don't know how other places do that, but pick whatever is the best I'm sure it's easy. Keep the senate as is to preserve the contract of the Union. Oh, I guess we have to start by killing all current representatives to not slow or obstruct the reform process. Tree of liberty, etc.

and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I've heard less realistic jokes, but not many. Texas democrats exist to expend out of state donor money on various retarded bullshit, not to win elections.

Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.

Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…

Yeah it's a problem as old as the republic and has a buncha good to go with the bad - making a minority district so the minority actually gets a representative instead of just getting diluted is a good thing. Or a bad thing?

...It's deeply complicated.

Yeah my understanding is that even in a lot of gerrymandered situations the boots on the ground for the party that's losing out would frequently rather have one ultra-secure seat to enable a 30 year tenure in the House versus 2 55-45 seats in which they've got competition coming both internally and from the other side. Plus more vulnerable to random macro upheavals.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.

How does that work? I genuinely do not know.

I'm not the election law lawyer you're looking for, but in short I'd say "it's a mess". Longer: the law in question is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, accompanied with a bunch of court precedents, of which the Gingles test. Per Wikipedia:

Under the Gingles test, plaintiffs must show the existence of three preconditions:

  1. The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
  2. The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
  3. The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."

There is some relevant more modern precedent, but that's the basic part. IMO it's not a good answer because it effectively dilutes the no-longer-majority votes that end up in that district (in largely the same ways, just reversed), and because putting too many minority voters in one district is "packing" which is also disallowed.

This is what happens when you don't have a constructive example of what should exist, just congressional and judicial legal wrist slapping saying "no, but not that".

ETA: Hopefully someone else can give a more complete answer.

Exactly! Is that enabling sclerotic politics? Is that perfect for enabling minority representation?

Shit I don't know but it is complicated and not a new political ethics problem caused by modern political division.

Norms only matter insofar as they're supported by a belief in a level playing field. Outside of boomers and some nothing-ever-happens centrists, both left and right seem to believe that the other side is an existential threat that cannot be stopped within the boundaries of our current norms, and so the shredding will continue at an increasing speed. At this point, all democratic norms should be considered pre-shredded, they are in a stack next to the shredder waiting their turn. The only reason they have not yet all been shredded is that the shredder operator works with an urgency that is proportional to the amount of political unrest in the U.S., which is currently only at a moderate simmer.

There's no reversing this until either both sides believe the other is acting in good faith, or (IMO) more likely the losing side is shut out from power and the winning side splits into two factions with enough political common ground to trust one another to uphold a new set of norms.

Which doesn’t matter at all because we basically never lived in a true democracy. I’m just kind of tired of the elite playing games as if they’re actually worried about the votes of the plebs.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder.

I'm not sure if that norm wasn't shredded years ago. I've been hearing complaints of gerrymandering since at least Bush II, and that's only because I wasn't really paying attention before that.

In your opinion, what makes this qualitatively different than past instances of gerrymandering?

Traditionally, redistricted has been restricted to the years immediately after a census, with outliers being driven by judicial command (or the results of recent judicial command, like the 2005 Georgia redistricting being driven by Cox v. Larios). In this case, the charitable motivation is downstream of the serious errors by the 2020 Census; the less charitable explanation is just politics.

Whether this difference matters or is anything but an ex post rationalization is left as an exercise for the reader; as long as it's a compelling and coherent rationalization the difference is pretty academic.

One might also note that until fairly recently, "judicial command" based on the Voting Rights Act included a mandate to maximize minority (in practice, Democratic) representation.

Packing enough minorities into a district minimizes Dem representation overall.

Yes, but both "packing" and "cracking" minorities are disallowed.

The way Texas politics works if this was going to be stopped it would've been stopped in the house.

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Well, one formerly red state did. It turns out that "the Legislature" and "the People" in the U.S. Constitution mean the same thing (or so 5 Supreme Court justices thought).

It's worth reading Roberts' dissent if you enjoy that kind of thing. (starting at 2678 by the pagination on the left side).

Just over a century ago, Arizona became the second State in the Union to ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. That Amendment transferred power to choose United States Senators from "the Legislature" of each State, Art. I, § 3, to "the people thereof." The Amendment resulted from an arduous, decades-long campaign in which reformers across the country worked hard to garner approval from Congress and three-quarters of the States.

What chumps! Didn't they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term "the Legislature" to mean "the people"? The Court today performs just such a magic trick with the Elections Clause. Art. I, § 4. That Clause vests congressional redistricting authority in "the Legislature" of each State. An Arizona ballot initiative transferred that authority from "the Legislature" to an "Independent Redistricting Commission." The majority approves this deliberate constitutional evasion by doing what the proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment dared not: revising "the Legislature" to mean "the people."

Yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to Roberts here. This precise case is, I believe, best read as a naked power struggle between the voters and the legislators. The latter had a privilege the former believed was being misused and wanted stripped from them. The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

Finally, his example of senator elections is trite. The question for senators was formally, how those elections should be operated. That obviously requires an amendment, since it’s changing a specific process. The point of the section on state elections is that the details are deferred to the state. Nothing more is specified beyond “the legislature.” Would Roberts have objected to a legislature voting for their own independent districting body on the basis that the Constitution forbids it? Or if you want something even wackier - the US Constitution does not specify the political structure of the states (beyond saying that the federal government will ensure they can have a republic, which was not defined as the American structure prior to America)! That is done by the state constitutions, individually. It is convention that they all resemble one another. But if a state rewrote its constitution to move the legislative power to something like, say, a series of elected bureaux, what in the Constitution would forbid this? Is this not a power delegated to the states? And then would “Legislature” in the Constitution refer to the legislating bodies, or to nothing at all, rendering the point moot? Or what if, oh, I don’t know, the state had rewritten its constitution to allow voters to legislate through the ballot? Does that include them in the legislating body? If not, then was the ballot initiative law unconstitutional? How can there be one without the other, when the Constitution does not state explicitly what structure it wants the states to have?

Roberts’ dissent is beyond specious. I rest my case.

The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

You're in good company since 5 of the Justices thought this way. They thought the result was good policy (as opposed to the many, many times the Supreme Court dislikes ballot initiatives, as Thomas lists in his dissent) and therefore the actual language of the Constitution didn't matter.

As to your other points, I suspect you didn't read Roberts' full dissent since he addresses some of your concerns. Not that you have to; there are better things in life than reading random SC decisions from 10 years ago about election laws.

Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?

His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:

Moreover, Dr. Johnson's first example of the usage of "legislature" is this: "Without the concurrent consent of all three parts of the legislature, no law is or can be made." 2 A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (emphasis deleted). Johnson borrowed that sentence from Matthew Hale, who defined the "Three Parts of the Legislature" of England as the King and the two houses of Parliament. History of the Common Law of England 2 (1713). (The contrary notion that the people as a whole make the laws would have cost you your head in England in 1713.) Thus, even under the majority's preferred definition, "the Legislature" referred to an institutional body of representatives, not the people at large.

That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?

Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.

To be clear, said legislatures are allowed to vest that power in an independent committee, right? Why was a ballot initiative even on the table?

Because the legislature refused to do it and voters pushed it through via the ballot measure.

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