That's one hell of an interesting twist.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Roberts and Gorsuch aren't obsessed with winning every short-game match up. They need gerrymandering to be legal in the abstract and for the long term. If they start trying to thread the needle between California and Texas, they give the lower courts more opportunities to overturn maps in Republican states and a future SCOTUS more elbow room to overturn their whole reading of legislative maps.
In a wave year where Republicans are likely getting swamped out of dozens of seats anyway, there's very little to gain and a lot to lose by creating an exception to the rule on when gerrymandering is legal.
If they start trying to thread the needle between California and Texas, they give the lower courts more opportunities to overturn maps in Republican states and a future SCOTUS more elbow room to overturn their whole reading of legislative maps.
The Roberts SCOTUS has already given any future SCOTUS ample precedent for utterly ignoring previous rulings as it suits their partisan needs several times over. If they think this one somehow stands separate from anything else it's laughable.
I'm sure they have something worse up their sleeve, and this wasn't worth the PR flak they'd catch.
Congratulations, you can use your maps!
On an unrelated note, your maps don’t matter, because we’re gonna let a pants-shitting child rapist cancel the elections as long as he says they’re “rigged.”
And even if he isn't able to do that, just the simple fact that Republicans have dominated rural areas and have ton of states with almost zero population in their thrall means they have a lot more room to run up the scoreboard with map shenanigans. If gerrymandering is legal for everyone, that's a net loss for the Dems.
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I'm sure they'll use this to justify flipping the Texas decision
I thought the Texas one was already permitted.
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Aka the supreme court couldnt figure out how to argue this without making themselves look even more like clowns OR they have a plan B.
In guessing plan B. If California can use this democrat friendly slanted map then every other state can use whatever conservative slanted maps they draw up.
This is my exact take too. Opening the floodgates for ultra gerrymandered maps.
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Plan B for sure. It smells like "Fine, gerrymander CA, we're gonna rig the shit out of this election anyway. Good luck, byeee!"
I think plan B is the ice agents at poking locations they announced today.
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It's both actually. The justices beholden to Trumpanzee were informed that the election will be stolen anyway and so the fallout from them "looking even more like clowns" wasn't necessary.
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Good, but also holy fuck we need to ban gerrymandering
Nice of them to "allow" it. I thought the states were responsible for their own elections?
The question was more about the constitutionality behind how the map was decided. Republicans were arguing it was about race which is unconstitutional. You can only gerrymander to make a one party state.... Which like... Wtf?
The think the race thing is one of the newer amendments, and the baseline is 'states can draw the maps however they want' because that's what they needed to say to get the states on board with being a country in the first place
I'd hope this will bring us closer to real legal barriers to gerrymandering, if hope hadn't been beaten out of me by now.
The weird thing is this CA law removed anti-gerrymandering laws. We had a legal barrier here in CA, but this law was to remove that barrier so we could counter TX. It sucked voting for it.
Yeah this was definitely a race for the bottom, but unfortunately a necessary one. Michelle Obama's idea of "when they go low, we go high" only works if your opponent has a miniscule amount of morals or shame.
It only works when the voters notice/care. If they did, the Republican Party would have died after GWB.
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It also doesn't work when a very large percentage of people desperately WANT you to go low.
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From what I've read the barrier wasn't actually removed, so much as putting it on pause for a time. This map will only be in place until 2030 when the maps were going to be redrawn anyway, at which point the new map will be created using the standard anti-gerrymandering method.
It’s time constrained.
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The change is time constrained. Anti gerrymandering laws go back into place.
I think this is really dangerous, actually. SCOTUS is no implicitly (or on their way to) saying that severe and perverse gerrymandering, is okay
This was already legally happening in Texas. Cali did this in response to Texas being allowed to heavily gerrymander their state in Republican favor.
Editing to add: And it's a time-constrained deal. This new map will only exist until 2030 when the maps would be redrawn anyhow. Cali put this up to a vote. Texas just...did it without a vote. Its near impossible for on-the-ground voters to get anything on a ballot in Texas due to the way the state Constitution is written.
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They have already ruled that severe and perverse gerrymandering is okay. Only racist gerrymandering is technically illegal, but they recently made that acceptable, too. Burn it down and start over.
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GOP maps were gerrymandered with the expectation that a certain amount of minority groups would still support the GOP and would factor into the way the districts are divided. All of that has changed now, meaning the assumptions made using past statistical data from elections and demographics are invalid. Much of it has to do with the views of immigration enforcement for the ones not deported. This also factors into DNC gerrymandering in other ways. Remains to be seen what impact the actual deportations have on voting. As long as no one being here illegally was voting, there is no net political loss for Democrats. It's not like they are losing voters. So the midterms will be very interesting. It's no surprise they want to take what's going on in Fulton County, Georgia and try to apply an illegal immigrant angle to it, then have Bannon say ICE needs to run intimidation campaigns at the polling stations. The effect of this again goes back to the same root issues. There is a long history in the U.S. of voting site intimidation. Much of it having to do with people exercising their rights to vote during the Civil Rights Era in the South.
As long as no one being here illegally was voting,
Narrator: "They weren't."
there is no net political loss for Democrats.
Possibly the opposite. Many of those violently kidnapped and deported have friends and family that ARE citizens and CAN vote. Many of them probably naively voted R in the last election. I suspect many of them will not make that mistake in the midterms.
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Hey - maybe this shouldn't be legal at all? Why is neither party proposing an amendment outlawing this?
The GOP will never support clean cut voting laws, they have to manipulate the votes to win anything they haven't had the numbers to win an election since Nixon. That's the reason our voting laws are convoluted in the first place.
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Amendments need 3/4 of the states to ratify. And good luck getting enough of the partisan controlled State governments to agree to that
There isnt any need for a constituonal amendment to stop gerrymandering. A simple act of Congress will do it
And, to be absolutely clear, nothing less than an act of Congress will stop it nationwide. And any anti-gerrymandering measure that isn't nationwide is an endorsement of partisan gerrymandering in red states.
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So, this CA law is removing the anti-gerrymandering legislation that CA Democrats got enacted. The Democrats proposed a state-wide initiative to stop gerrymandering. It won, and we were all happy. Now we have to remove that legislation because Republicans in other states are going the other direction.
If you think getting 20 Republican governors to sign up for a Constitutional amendment that will destroy the chances of a Republican majority US House is a doable do, then I have a bridge to sell you. The thing is, even proposing it would cost the taxpayers million in all the logistical crap that would happen to have a vote for something guaranteed to fail.
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Is it because they know there will be no elections?
"Oops we fucked democracy. Let's do the bare minimum going forward."
Not gonna lie, I was morbidly looking forward to how they were going to rule against California while still upholding Texas.
I think they're fully confident armed ICE and CBP will be able to keep any lefties and minorities away from the polling booths in Cali,
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