What are your thoughts on this court ruling, covering gerrymandering?

[Cubus]

A bit of context:

Sometime ago, the court tossed away the congressional district map for Louisiana. The previous congressional maps were drawn in a way that created 5 safe districts for Republicans and 1 safe district for Democrats. It looked like this.

These maps were tossed away after court ruling. The new maps, looked like this:

This court ruling was almost to guarantee Democrats a pickup of one seat, as the new 6th district is deep blue.

The case is - a few days ago a federal court in a 2-1 ruling tossed away the new maps (the 4-2 map) pointing out the division of cities and parishes along racial lines and the abnormal shape of the new 6th district. The case is likely to end up in a Supreme Court

Source:https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/30/louisiana-court-black-house-district-00155351

[DryGermanGuy]

If that topic interests you, I assume you are following Democracy Docket on YouTube?

https://www.youtube.com/@DemocracyDocket/videos

Equally interesting are the Democracy Watch segments from Brian Tyler Cohen's channel, also with Marc Elias as guest.

[Cubus]

I don't. I just read Politico

[OlderAndWiser]

Gerrymandering is an ancient practice in American politics.

[Cubus]

Yet with every decade American geostrategists get better and better at this practice.

[normalice]

Personally I think every district should be a toss up district but it's not up to me..

[Cubus]

There are very few toss up districts nowadays, because Republicans in red states pass maps that create deep red districts and Democrats in blue states pass maps that creates deep blue districts.

Every precint of land is thought to be maximally efficient, noithing is meant to be left to accident

[KostasKouvalis]

I think you got the maps mixed up. Regardless, I don't see what the big deal is with gerrymandering. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.

[KostasKouvalis]

Why not just have a neutral third party draw up the districts if it bothers them so much?

[Cubus]

I didn't. The first one is the old map and the second one (with that "snake" crawling through half of the state) is the new one.

[Cubus]

"Why not just have a neutral third party draw up the districts if it bothers them so much?"

In some states it looks like this. But it does not always work. For example in California, there was an independent commision that was responsible for drawing maps, that consisted of 5 Republicans, 5 Democrats and 5 independents. The problem was - despite of that, members of that commision were still left of center, with even some Republicans being pretty liberal, which resulted in the maps being a bit biased towards Democrats (not extremely, but still more to the left than to the right).

[KostasKouvalis]

WTF? The new map is more gerrymandered than the old one.

Congressional districts are weird, but honestly, gerrymandering seems like a logical option to me

[Cubus]

The official ground was that so Black would have a second district.

Non-official - so that Democrats would have a second district.

And yeah - contrary to Alabama case, here I oppose this. This "snake" from Shreveport to Baton Rouge looks ridiculous.

[KostasKouvalis]

Yes, I agree. They could have at least made it less obvious 😂

[Cubus]

Those were actually Republicans who passed these new maps (they were forced to but still - they could have draw this 6th district different)

[OtterMan68]

Have you seen Ohio's map?

[Cubus]

Yes. Republicans have 10 seats and Democrats have 5 seats