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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.

In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.

They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.

  • -21

I think your example is more than simply disparate impact. If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

A better comparison would be an accounting firm which only hires hot women. Then some Muslims complain that this is a discrimination against Muslims, because in traditional Muslim families, it is the husband who works outside the house and earns money. The employer does not give a damn about the religious affiliations of his employees, as long as there is enough cleavage for him to leer at. Is the employer guilty of religious discrimination?

Southern Republicans don't care about the skin color of the voters, they would happily win with the votes of the Blacks if the Blacks were voting for them. However, they care about the Republicans winning the maximum amount of seats, and Blacks tend to vote for Democrats, so they gerrymander to constrain the voting power of them, just like they try to constrain the voting power of urban communities or furries.

If Republicans were on record that they would rather lose than win with Black votes, things would be clear, it would be straightforward racial discrimination. This way, it seems much less clear, but I would argue that partisan gerrymandering is bad in itself.

Obviously FPTP is to blame, and the US should just adopt a better voting system. Or they should do recursive gerrymandering. (7% voted for candidate A, but due to communal gerrymandering, candidate A won 13% of the communities. Due to the gerrymandering of the communities, this won him 26% of the districts. Due to the distribution of states, this this won him 51% percent of the EC vote, so welcome your new president.)

If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

Unironically, not so! If I’m running a machine shop, I don’t want turbans anywhere near my lathes. Other headwear doesn’t present nearly as much of a scalping risk.

That is fair. If you ban shawls, turbans and neckties, (or even better, impose upper limits on the tensile strength of anything rope-y worn around above the belt line), I would call that very reasonable.

(Of course, for the SJ left, that is still disparate impact. And the fact that you are running a machine shop instead of an ad agency in the first place is just further evidence that you are in the enemy class.)

I prefer to keep my head as far away from the spindle as possible when I'm operating a lathe, personally.

This is just disparate impact. I agree with Gail / Richard here that any possible standard you can think of has a disparate impact, and that its bad and dumb and makes no sense.

Try to think of a way of hiring or promoting people that does not benefit one group at the expense of another.

Simple: give up on meritocracy and equal protection, and set a quota by race/sex/etc. If you can't tune it perfectly (e.g. 5/10 board members can be women, but other areas don't have strict categories or nice numbers), then be sure to err against non-protected groups.

It's not good, but it is almost as simple as figuring out what the criteria is and then following it.

Politically I am fine with disparate impact when the country was 85/15 white/black. But it doesn’t work at all after the migration of last 40 years.

That being said VRA has always been unconstitutional allow with all racial discrimination.

IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.

This isn't going to happen because

  • Machine politicians of other ethnicities are a key element of the Democratic coalition that could punish politicians for doing the deal.
  • White anti-black racists are a key element of the Republican coalition likewise
  • The vast majority of the problems caused by low-human-capital sub-populations in the US are caused by ADOS blacks anyway.

But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.

This seems like a deeper explanation of what I said works for me. Logically the two groups are different. Natives and blacks aren’t here by choice so finding a way to get them to have special representation that they couldn’t earn on their own makes some sense.

The reason you left out is the ratio we would have today with more groups claiming they need special accommodations. You can have functional institutions when 15% of the people have special status but the other 85% are assimilated whites who would still have comfortable governing majorities. It would be like 60-40 today. You lose the comfortable majority to govern today. The less the ratio is “meritocratic” and the more it is “special privilege” the worse the system becomes.

It would be like 60-40 today.

Worse than that because women are affirmative-action eligible.

This runs into a very basic question: if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

The historic proposition was that you can have the general rule but allow for reasonable accommodations (eg if you are fired for refusing to work the sabbath, then that isn’t quitting for unemployment purposes but if you claimed every day was the sabbath that would be quitting).

Here, there doesn’t seem to be an easy accommodation.

if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

If you look closely enough (and I've never seen a specific proposed amount of "acceptable" impact here), all general rules have a disparate impact at some form. I think it'd be difficult to come up with an example of two statistical variables that are absolutely uncorrelated for any sample size in the wild.

ETA: For a rather concrete example, any tax regime almost certainly has some degree of disparate impact. If income is correlated with race [citation left to reader], the burden of income taxation is as well, presenting a disparate impact on high earners (especially for a progressive taxation regime).

In order to stop conspiracy theory disparate impact racism you're advocating for explicit racism.

The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.

It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?

The solution here would be an arms length neutral body made up of experts from non-political backgrounds which deicdes on districts and isn't subject to the executive in who's on it. A bit like how the Judicial Appointments Comission decides on who to appoint as judges in the UK completely independent from whoever is in government at the time. All the gerrymandered angular districts would disappear in one fell swoop and things would look a lot more reasonable.

  • -13

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics. I know the left generally hates States Rights because it limits their power more but we do have regional economies. You can only have a few SuperStar high margin based economies. Most do not work in those fields. Most people build a widget for $4 and sell it for $5. A lot of people have seen a huge QOL improvement being able to move out of California. Somewhat housing related but the tax regime Apple or Jane St can bear is not the same tax regime a small moat manufacturer can bear.

Perhaps you could just pass an Amendment limiting it to congressional districts but it would be a slippery slope.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

It is a solved problem in every other democracy with single-member districts, despite the stakes being even higher in Parliamentary systems. I agree that the level of partisan rancour in the US right now is that it couldn't be done from scratch, with the possible exception where a non-partisan populist governor in a purple state like Jesse Ventura decided to make ending gerrymandering in the state part of his legacy. In the US context, proportional representation within states (or large multi-member districts in the largest states - NY could have separate lists for NYC+LI and upstate, for example) is the obviously correct approach.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics.

This is a good rhetorical point for conservatives to make to each other, but the moral logic of States' Rights doesn't include a state's right to organise its government in a sufficiently non-democratic way. There isn't a Chesterton's Fence here - the general principle is in the Constitution (the "republican form of government" clause) and there is a history of successful federal interventions against insufficiently internally democratic states during the civil rights era. (Under current SCOTUS doctrine there are no grounds for intervention, but "current SCOTUS doctrine" is not a moral argument, and in a world where "everyone knows" that SCOTUS is a partisan institution that doesn't really believe in the rule of law it isn't a legal argument either.)

There are some purple states (notably North Carolina and Wisconsin) where the state legislature is so gerrymandered (and has the power to continue to gerrymander itself in perpetuity) that state legislators are no longer meaningfully accountable to voters. In the current year there is no federal authority that could intervene as anything other than a blatant partisan flex, but if SCOTUS still had the credibility it did in 1964 then intervening would be very much within the tradition of American constitutionalism.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

Federal election gerrymandering ultimately destroys state-level politics by making state elections proxy federal elections. This is a large part of why the OG Progressives supported the 17th amendment. (The other was that US senate elections in state legislatures were a bribe magnet). This is an old problem - the 1858 state legislative elections in Illinois are famous for a series of debates between US Senate candidates who were not on the ballot.

Perhaps nice compact districts like this.

Anyway, we lack angels in the form of neutral experts to redistrict us.

My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.

The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:

  • Responses organised by political parties for partisan purposes, where the actual arguments made are specious.
  • Responses saying that they should tolerate even more population inequality than we already do to better align district boundaries with natural boundaries (which are usually, but not always, municipal boundaries).

At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

There can be a knowable optimum answer under those conditions, but in much of the US such a map would "pack" Democrats, giving Republicans a significant advantage -- that's why I posted the Florida map, which does pretty much that.

My trolling solution is to randomly assign voters to districts: "look ma, no consideration at all of race, creed, or anything". Except that it's definitionally the worst possible gerrymander.

Honestly, I think geographic districting is a lost cause and proportional statewide representation would at least give easy answers to these problems.

I'm pretty sure this one of the Supreme Court partisan gerrymandering cases had this exact fact-pattern. They wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of possible maps that all comply with "traditional districting criteria", then picked the map that had the most Republican seats.

Precisely. And of course the only acceptably neutral, arms-length body of experts from non-political backgrounds and isn't subject to the executive is the one that I personally select.

It's amazing how many things turn out to work this way.

Would you say the black person who says, "I don't want to be assumed to vote Democrat just because I'm black" is more sympathetic to this SCOTUS decision than one who's fine with that assumption?

It's outdated by now, but exit polling of the 2016 election had Black voters favoring Clinton more than Republicans favored Trump. It was literally more true than "I don't want to be assumed to vote Republican just because I'm a Republican" in that case.

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