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Notes -
Did The Motte talk about the latest set of oral arguments at SCOTUS for Louisiana vs. Callais? The case is a continuation of the NAACP LDF's efforts to turn this big red blob of a congressional district that Louisiana created into a slightly longer contiguous red blob, but with new lines and a new congressional district. If SCOTUS was to affirm the district court's ruling, then the LDF will have won an additional majority black district in a state that is 33% black. For the sake of context, numbers I find put the state at 30% black in 1990, so this is a relatively stable share.
The decision to upend Louisiana's proposed 2022 map, it was be argued, is what Federal law requires. Section 2 of the VRA has been amended, extended, and litigated on several occasions since the 1965. In 1986, SCOTUS described the Gingles test to determine whether a majority-minority district should be created. I'm sure there are pages of nuance before and betwixt each:
According to the NAACP, when the LDF received their favorable decision against the state in 2024, a group of "self-described 'non-African American [Louisiana] voters'" challenged this on the basis of 14th and 15th amendment issues. SCOTUS first heard the case in March of this year, but decided to schedule reargument (somewhat uncommon) which occurred last week. (PDF) The nature of the questions now in play led to a flurry of articles concerned that "justices could upend decades of court decisions holding that states may — and sometimes must — use race-conscious redistricting to protect the voting power of minorities." Other outlets like The Federalist take a Buzzfeed-esque dunk list approach to reporting the case.
My understanding is nobody knows just what kind of scope in ruling we should expect, but that the questions to follow suggest something broader than a Yes/No to a district map. There are all kinds of tidbits worth debating. There's my Big Questions which SCOTUS will not answer like: by how much does the fact my US representative is a black man, whose race I do not share, mean he doesn't represent me? It seems every minority whose vote doesn't represent their A) race and B) party can be considered un(der)represented, even if Congress hasn't provided a statute or adopted a different system of representation to resolve this.
At the time the VRA was written the demographics were very different to today's. Kavanaugh asked Nelson, who was arguing for the LDF, whether there should be a time limit on court ordered, law enforced racial voting maps. He receives a frank reply that is basically "lol, never." It's statute it doesn't just go away unless Congress changes it. That makes sense, but seems to force the hand of a potential majority that has questions on how this all works out.
Justice Jackson covers the more popular argument I see in the wild. She says,
To her credit, she only mentions the word disparity once in arguments. This is the argument that until blacks disperse themselves geographically as other minorities have, or achieve similar outcomes to something, then states are required to continue to grant them majority-minority districts.
If you transported my liberal sensibilities to 1965 you'd probably convince me with ease that this little unconstitutional carve out was justified and workable. Not so much these days. I don't look forward to a total upending of the VRA house of cards. Sounds messy, but this is the consequence of previous pragmatisms of SCOTUS. The pragmatist leverage left, for me, is the fact gerrymandering is cynical by its nature. If you leave it to states without limitation, then they will discriminate by race for the very reason Justice Jackson says: blacks vote Democrat reliably enough to target. Which means we would still have to answer constitutional questions about lines on a map.
If you're worried about any kind of minority, racial or otherwise, having representation in government, there are better ways than carving up districts where they'll plausibly win a seat.
Enforced gerrymandering is a hack to get a desired outcome some of the time, when with a refactor we could build the desired outcome into the system. Add or change one of the legislative houses so that we have proportional representation.
I mean the straightforwards way to give blacks representation in Louisiana is to have the blacks elect 1/3 of the reps and whites(ok, 'everyone else', but in practice they are white) the other two thirds. That just happens to be illegal under the VRA, too- AFAICT the black majority districts is illegal too, just less blatantly so.
Even that straightforward approach has some interesting questions to handle about rounding. In this case, 1/3 of 6 seats works out, but it's not hard to look at other states and imagine "24.9 percent of two seats" or things like that.
This is well studied problem in parliamentary democracies where the seats are assigned at the level of the whole country, rather than by district. It is also applicable to determining for each first level division of a country how many seats it should have in the lower house, given the population (not counting Indians not taxed) of each such division.
Apportionment is the key word here, and here is a cool demo showing various methods (click on the name of the method for further description).
I'm going to get on my hobby horse about apportionment.
First, I'm going to assume everyone is familiar with the Constitutional Apportionment Amendment.
For those unaware, there are three premises to this amendment, although it only lists three stages instead of repeating forever:
First, there is maximum number of people per seat.
Second, based on the total population and the number of people per seat, there is a number of total seats.
Third, every time the number of total seats increases by 100, the number of people per seat increase by 10,000.
This started with 30k people per seat for all populations between 0 and 3 million (3m/30k = 100 seats), then 40k between 3 and 8 million (8m/40k = 200 seats), and then 50k for anything higher than that.
If this was continued, and given the 331m on the 2020 census, 308m from 2010, and 281m from 2000, the minimum house seat count would be 1564, 1625, and 1700. In 2000, we'd have 180k per seat maximum, in 2010 it would be 190k, and in 2020 we'd be able to have districts of up to 200k people, and no fewer than 1700 seats. Apportioned so that Wyoming gets its 3 representatives, that puts our max size at 192,283.
This also fixes the Electoral College. Wyoming goes from 1 representative to 3 (2.9 rounded up), while California goes from 52 to a whopping 205. The electoral votes are these +2, so instead of 18x the electoral vote, it's 41x. That's still not equal to the 69x population difference, but it goes a long way towards smoothing the worst problems.
If someone wants to tell me how to format a table I'll make this prettier, but here are the counts by my reckoning.
With so many votes in a single state, I would also add the Nebraska/Maine-style split electors to the mix to dilute the power of swing states.
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Without drastically changing how representatives work, Montana's one house seat isn't going to reflect its entire populace. By some definitions, single-seat states are the most gerrymandered (slaps roof "this district can fit so many minorities without giving any of them representation!"), although clearly not so by local legislative intent.
Montana has two seats. The one seat states are- Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, the Dakotas, and Alaska.
TIL: It had only one until 2022 (and had two previously last century). My memory wasn't completely wrong there.
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