President Trump and Violations of Human Rights

The newspapers and internet this week have been full of stories about the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Turkey. Many commentators have written that President Trump's reaction, at least initially, was inappropriately tepid … at the very least. The President indicated that he (and by extension, the United States) had little reason to respond because Khashoggi was not a citizen of the United States.

Several days later, Leslie Stahl asked in an interview how the United States should respond to Khashoggi's murder if the charges turned out to be true. Trump responded that he didn't want to lose the Saudis' $110 billion order for military equipment because it would "hurt jobs" in United States. In other words, the Saudis alleged severe violation of human rights could be justified by an economic transaction.  Trump saidto Stahl:

There are other ways of — punishing, to use a word that’s a pretty harsh word, but it’s true.  (my italics) 

 In other words to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of a journalist would be too harsh a response for its crime committed against the world order.

In the same interview, Trump acknowledged that Russia's President Vladimir Putin was "probably" involved in a number of murders of Russian nationals who were living at the time in Great Britain. Trump responded: "it didn't happen here [in the United States], so it's not our responsibility." Leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of his general relationship with Putin, Trump is again saying that severe human rights violations can happen anywhere else in the world without a significant response from the United States.

Trump seems to have a great deal of respect for the autocrats of the world.  Indeed, the first visit his presidency was to Crown Prince bin Salman of Saudi Arabia despite that country's terrible human rights record. The President has also expressed approval of the autocratic rulers of:

• Egypt (el-Sissi)
• the Philippines (Duerte)
• Turkey (Erdocan)
• China (Xi Jinping) and even some who are dead
       Mussolini (Italy)
       Kaddafi (Libya)
       Hussein (Iraq)

At the same time he’s expressing approval of autocracies, Trump is consistently voicing disdain for democratic countries, such as Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, and others. The protection of human rights is at the foundation of any democracy, yet Trump flagrantly displays his lack of concern.

This is all to say nothing of President Trump's disdain for the foundations of our own democracy:

• he has complained about or mocked the judiciary, the media, the rule of law (eg. treatment of immigrants);
• he has suggested changing libel laws so he could punish the media;
• he has attempted to suppress Americans' right to protest,

I have been insisting throughout this blog that democracy is a fragile thing. As I've written before, fewer and fewer Americans believe that democracy is important or that it is even a good thing.  Fewer and fewer participate in the vote especially among young—even in local and state-wide democratic institutions.

Democracy requires faith, and it requires participation. It also requires a set of moral values that value freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of dissent, and respect for human rights.

It is critical that the United States endorses and gives support to these values around the world.

President Trump, however, has made clear that United States will not interfere in flagrant violations of human rights** or of democratic norms not only in other countries but also in the United States. Especially at this critical time in our history in which democracy is under attack from many sides, President Trump's refusal to support democracy around the world is another example of his powerfully disruptive force opposing the world's commitment to democracy.

**More on human rights in a future post.

Will Amercans Trust the Supreme Court?

In this post I want to examine the attack on the Constitution's separation of powers provisions—which are laid out in the Constitution's first three Articles—especially as they pertain to the Supreme Court.  Both the President and Congress have become extremely partisan and have not been able to hold up their end of the separation of powers agreement.  Then, over the last generation, the Supreme Court has become increasingly partisan, too, which threatens to destroy this fundamental part of American governance.

The Separation of Powers

As I have written before, American democracy depends upon this separation of powers among the three branches of government: the executive (the President), the legislative (Congress), and the judicial (the courts, especially the Supreme Court).  Each branch can limit the power of either of the others.  Congress, for instance, can impeach the president or a Supreme Court justice; the Supreme Court can declare unconstitutional congressional legislation or presidential action; the president can veto legislation and nominate justices to the Supreme Court.  “The Separation of Powers devised by the framers of the Constitution was designed to do one primary thing: to prevent the majority from ruling with an iron fist.”  Aware of the almost absolute power of the British monarchy, the Founding Fathers instituted these controls on any single branch of government to prevent one from overwhelming the others.  It has worked well.  In fact our democracy depends on it.  As far as I know, few other countries have such controls on power.

Popular Support for Supreme Court … And Its Decline

The Supreme Court has maintained its popular support (in Gallup polls, a relatively steady 50%) as the other branches have lost more and more respect.  Congress is at an all-time low: in Gallup polls less than 20% of Americans trust Congress to do the right thing.  The popularity of the President swings back and forth, depending on partisan support; it is currently about 40%.

The Supreme Court has historically remained above partisanship and has retained the respect of the American people despite very controversial decisions such as Brown vs Board of Education (requiring integration of schools) in 1954, Roe vs Wade (prohibiting states from banning abortion) in 1973) and Bush vs Gore (declaring George Bush the President in a very close election in Florida) in 2000.  Despite these inevitably divisive decisions, the Court retained the grudging support of the country and the confidence that it would remain above partisanship.

Unfortunately, the rationale for this trust is gradually being shredded.  Before Justice Clarence Thomas's acrimonious confirmation hearings in 1991, favorable votes for nominees were nearly unanimous.  The confirmation vote for Thomas in 1991, however, was 52 – 48 along partisan lines.  Since the vote for Chief Justice John Roberts (78 – 22) in 2005, no nominee has received more than 68 yes votes, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were confirmed by razor thin margins along partisan lines.

Until 2013 Supreme Court nominations required 60 votes for confirmation, which assured that there would be at least some bipartisan support.  Unfortunately, in 2013, Democrats became increasingly frustrated with the Republican slow-down on confirmations for Obama appointees to lower federal courts.  In response, the Democrats – then in the majority – used the "nuclear option" and changed the requirement for confirmation of these lower-court judges to a simple majority.  They were then able to quickly confirm the backlog of appointees.  The shortsightedness of this maneuver became quickly apparent with Trump's nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court's in 2017.  The Republican Senate, understandably, changed the rules on Supreme Court nominations as well so that a simple majority was all that was required for confirmation.  Since then, both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been confirmed with fewer than fifty-five votes almost strictly along partisan lines.  No longer is there any need to reach out across party lines.

As I mentioned in my last post, the vote for Kavanaugh's confirmation could have been predicted as soon as Trump nominated him because of the partisanship that now surrounds the Court, too.  Even after the extraordinary accusations of Kavanaugh's sexual assaults as an adolescent, the confirmation was pushed through before adequate FBI investigation.  Only one Democratic senator voted yes and no Republican senators voted no.

McConnell's Refusal to Hold Hearings on Merrick Garland

Perhaps the most egregious act of partisanship occurred at the beginning of President Obama's last year in office when he nominated federal appeals court Justice Merrick Garland to fill Justice Antonio Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court.  Ten years earlier Garland had been confirmed to the appeals court with majority Republicans support.  In 2016, however, Senator Mitch McConnell used his naked power as Majority Leader and simply refused to bring Justice Garland's nomination to a vote on the Senate floor, thereby depriving President Obama of his constitutional right to nominate Supreme Court judges and neglecting the Senate's constitutional responsibility to confirm them.  President Trump was elected later that year and nominated right-wing Justice Neil to the seat that would have gone to a moderate.  Gorsuch's ascension to the Court further divided it along partisan lines.

Bitter Confirmation Hearings and Personal Attacks

Probably even worse than the partisanship of the votes was the increasingly bitterness of the confirmation hearings.  Until the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork in 1987, personal attacks were almost unheard of.  The debate around Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, however, was fierce and deeply personal.

The recent Senate debate around confirmation for Brett Kavanaugh reached a new low in incivility.  In addition to the assaults from Senators' questioning, Justice Kavanaugh's testimony given in response to the allegations of his sexual assault broke with the ironclad tradition of the Court's political neutrality.  Kavanaugh angrily accused Democrats of concocting the entire sexual-assault narrative because of their anger ant Trumps' election and in order to block Kavanaugh's confirmation.  Never before had a Supreme Court nominee revealed in such explicit terms their partisan bias.  It is hard to believe that Justice Kavanaugh's votes on the Court will not be tainted by at least the perception of partisan bias.

Implications

The importance of these developments, I think, cannot be overestimated.  The extreme partisanship, willingness to deprive the president of his constitutional responsibility to appoint judges to the Supreme Court, and the tawdry nature of the confirmation process debase Congress and damage the respect for the Supreme Court. 

The Court has no independent power to enforce its decisions and it depends completely on its moral authority for its power.  As George Will has written about Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist papers #78

The judiciary is …“the least dangerous” branch [of government] because, having “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” it has “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” Its judgments, however, can be uniquely powerful because they rely entirely on the moral authority of conscientious reasoning explained in writing. 

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan noted that

the court’s strength as an institution of American governance depends on people believing it has a certain kind of legitimacy — on people believing it’s not simply just an extension of politics, that its decision-making has a kind of integrity to it.  If people don’t believe that, they have no reason to accept what the court does.

The damage to the moral authority upon which the court depends, however, has been grave.  For the next generation, it will be difficult for Americans to give Court decisions, especially the 5 – 4 decisions, the legitimacy that is required in a functioning democracy. 

The separation of powers that has served our country for over two centuries can no longer be taken for granted.  Already Congress, for instance, has refused to accept responsibility for limiting President Trump's uglier decisions.  This President can hardly be depended upon to act as a counterweight to inappropriate congressional action.  If the Supreme Court now becomes as partisan as it looks like it will, the separation of powers so important in American governance will have been almost obliterated.  The danger to the democracy cannot, it seems to me, be overstated.

Partisanship and Democracy

Aside from clear-cut, blockbusting FBI findings that would obviously disqualify President Trump's nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, from serving on the Supreme Court, the Senate will soon confirm him to serve the life-time term of a Justice in the Court.  What should be astonishing to us is that the vote on this nomination, even with its razor-thin margin of confirmation, could largely have been predicted almost three months earlier on July 9, when the President nominated Judge Kavanaugh. This completely partisan vote, however astonishing, will not be surprising.

Strictly partisan Congressional votes are no longer surprising.  Most controversial votes are now decided with almost all the Democrats on one side and almost all the Republicans on the other.  It's the deciding vote against one's party's position (such as Senators McCain, Murkowski, and Collin's vote on Obamacare) that is newsworthy.  Partisanship has now become the established way of national politics.  We have become so inured to it we largely shrug it off every time it happens. It's the new normal.

Prior to 1992, such absolute partisanship was uncommon.  We have forgotten how unusual the current state of governance is in the history of American democracy.  Individual members of Congress no longer debate the issues meaningfully but come to their decisions based on small hyper-partisan groups within their constituency. The only criterion seems to be "winning" the vote “for the party.”

One result of this development is that it deeply constrains us voters to act along strictly predetermined party lines, even if we are personally open-minded enough to have convictions outside party dictates.  For example, a constituent who is strongly opposed to abortion-on-demand (currently a Republican position) yet committed to fighting global climate change (currently a Democratic point of view) will likely have no candidate who shares both her positions. At election time, she can vote against abortion OR for government action on climate change, not both. 

The votes in Congress will depend only upon which party is in power.

As undesirable as this is, it has not been judged unconstitutional. The Founding Fathers did not even envision the development of political parties. Since our Constitution does call for "one person, one vote," however, one could make a reasonable case that this hyper-partisanship should be considered unconstitutional since those who stand, for example, both against abortion and for climate control legislation have no meaningful vote.  In a true democracy, each important issue is debated and each side is given a chance to argue its position. In the current partisan environment, however, no such meaningful debate can occur.

Whatever one thinks of the appropriateness of Judge Kavanaugh's place on the Supreme Court, the debates in the judiciary committee were rancorous and meaningless.  Despite Senator Flake's courageous insistence on further FBI investigation, confirmation has hardly been in doubt (unless the FBI were to present extraordinary findings). The extraordinary charges and counter-charges presented at the hearing only served to deepen the partisan divide in our government and in our country.

Not only is this level of partisanship frustrating and unfair, but it also chips away at American democracy.

Note: I wrote this post a full 5 days before Kavanaugh's confirmation, prior to the public concern about his teen-age behavior. And though this behavior was never satisfactorily resolved, the partisan vote on his confirmation was unchanged.

Trump Administration Detains Citizens in Texas

The Trump administration has begun confiscating the passports of some US citizens who were born to midwives on the Texas-Mexico border almost 30 years ago.  The government has detained some of these Latinx citizens in US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) prisons and initiated deportation hearings for others.  A few have already been deported.  Initially, the media investigated and reported on this unconstitutional practice, but within several days the story dropped from the media and has disappeared from public view.

Here’s the story:

Unlike most industrialized countries in the world, the United States automatically grants citizenship to those born in the country, regardless of their parents’ immigrant status.  Their birth certificate is automatically proof of citizenship.

For decades along the Texas-Mexico border, midwives delivered babies to the many people who could not afford a doctor.  The midwives filled out birth certificates, and the babies became US citizens.  In the early 1990s, however, there were reports of some midwives accepting bribes to issue fraudulent birth certificates to babies who had actually been born in Mexico.  Some fifteen of the midwives practicing in southern Texas were investigated and ten were convicted; officials at the time made attempts to identify which birth certificates were legitimate and which weren’t.  Since even the convicted midwives had also delivered many babies in the US and the hundreds of other midwives had issued countless legitimate birth certificates, it was virtually impossible, even then, to determine which were legitimate and which were not.  Some of the babies were nevertheless deported.

In order to resolve the issue, the ACLU sued the government in 2009 and came to an agreement with the State Department: “Citizens will no longer be denied a passport solely because of their race, ancestry or because they happened to be born at home with a midwife."  After that 2009 decision, the George W. Bush administration quickly began winding the policy down, and the Obama Administration ended it completely.  (It is not true—as has been argued by the State Department and reported in recent news accounts—that Obama continued the policy of deportations; rather, he and Bush inherited the problem from fifteen years previously and stopped it almost immediately after the 2009 agreement.) 

In the past months, however, the Trump administration re-initiated the process of confiscating Latinx passports and issuing deportation orders.  As a result, some citizens with official US birth certificates or passports are being held in immigration detention centers and are subject to deportation proceedings.

The government has not yet issued any criteria for identifying people who were actually born in the US nor has it given reasons to suspect that any these individuals were in fact born in Mexico.  So far, the only criterion seems to be that the person is Latinx and delivered by a midwife along the border.  The government has insisted on further proof, such as hospital records, evidence of their mother’s prenatal care, baptismal certificates, family Bibles, school records, rental agreements and so on.  Lacking that, confiscated passports and, in some cases, initiated deportation proceedings.  Some of these citizens are 40 years old or more.  Some have served in the military.  There is no rationale offered.  The bottom line is that some US citizens who have legitimate passports must prove that they are citizens, by criteria few of the rest of us could fulfill either.  Even for those who are not detained, important civil rights are no longer protected:

• voting,
• foreign travel (even to visit relatives in their home country),
• public assistance benefits,
• freedom from arrest as undocumented immigrants,
• even the right to return to the US after a trip away,
• and others.

The State Department has so far refused to report how widespread the detentions are, but lawyers along the border have reported a marked increase in deportation proceedings of both citizens and documented immigrants.  Despite trampling on the due process clauses in the 4th and 15th Amendments to our Constitution, the Administration plows ahead. 

The impact of this new policy will be felt in several areas:

• Although the Supreme Court will undoubtedly rule the practice unconstitutional, the real impact on other immigrants—both documented and undocumented as well as on naturalized citizens—will be profound.  Even after the Supreme Court determines the policy unconstitutional, the damage will have been done and the fear will persist.  The reluctance to have contact with government agencies will sharpen.  The food-stamp program, other important benefit programs for naturalized and other citizens—voluntary contact with law enforcement, and perhaps even emergency room visits and school education for children—will almost certainly be affected, making life in the immigrant community even more painful than it already is.
• In the long run, and even more important to our democracy, this unconstitutional attack will undoubtedly be popular among Trump’s supporters.  The commitment to our Constitution and to the balance of powers within our government will be weakened.  Even among Trump’s critics, the notion that he can so easily subvert the democratic process will weaken our commitment to peaceful change and the constitutional process.
• When the basic constitutional right of due process has been trampled on, we can only imagine what will be next as the administration tries to stifle dissent,

The silence within the media after the first reports is also very concerning.  I will examine this and other impacts of Trump’s actions on the media in my next post. 
The power of this one man’s ability to damage our democracy becomes more and more frightening.

Taking Their Votes Away - Part 2

As I explained in the previous post, voter suppression in the United States is as old as the country.  At the very founding of our country, the vote was withheld from women, African Americans and other people of color, non-property owners and others; slavery legally prohibited African Americans from the vote; during Jim Crow, violence, threats of violence, poll taxes, and other techniques kept most people of color from voting.  Those kinds of obvious voter suppression are pretty much (but not completely) over. 

Voter suppression and attempts at voter suppression, however, are still very real, just more sophisticated than before Jim Crow. 

“Voter ID”

“Voter ID” laws allow people to vote only if they provide certain forms of government-issued ID, usually with picture identification.  Voter ID laws discourage classes of people from voting, especially people of color and the poor.  These laws (and, especially, legislative attempts to create these laws) have become increasingly common over the past several years, predominantly in the states where the legislature and/or the governor are Republican.  (Wikipedia has a comprehensive [although I think somewhat confusing] entry on voter ID laws from which much of the following is taken.)

The stated rationale for voter ID laws) is to prevent voter-impersonation fraud, ie, people voting twice, undocumented immigrants voting, and people voting for another person.  (Even citizen-immigrants can be scared off for fear of attracting law-enforcement attention.)  Not surprisingly, these methods disproportionately target groups that mostly vote for Democrats:

• the poor,
• the less educated,
• immigrants,
• the elderly,
• those with prison records,
• non-car-owners,
• and those who find it more difficult or less necessary to acquire such identification.
• Cost can be a significant barrier: a Harvard study determined that the expenses for documentation, travel, and waiting time for obtaining voter identification cards typically range from $75-$175.  When legal fees are added in, the costs range as high as $1500, a not insignificant sum for low-income voters or some in minority groups.

While both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have used gerrymandering (see Part 1) for their own purposes, it’s been the Republican Party that has led efforts to create more stringent voter ID laws for their stated objective of preventing voter impersonation.  Not surprisingly, it’s been an extremely conservative organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that prepared model legislation to impose photo ID requirements; these have then been circulated to conservative state legislators.

It must be stated clearly that in the United States there is absolutely no evidence for significant voter impersonation fraud (the only type of fraud that a picture ID would prevent); it is extraordinarily rare, never coming close to being an actual problem in an election, certainly not one that would influence the results of a real-world election.  As The Washington Post found in a study of one billion ballots (local, state and federal elections), there were only 31 credible (not proven) claims of individual voter fraud (considerably less than the chance of being hit by lightning.)  There are multiple such studies with then same results.  Anyone who looks at the data can see that voter ID laws do far more damage to the electoral system by suppressing votes than good by preventing the minuscule number of fraudulent votes.

Other forms of suppression

Other states have laws that appear bipartisan and fair but actually affect primarily the poor and minorities.  States have

• drastically limited early voting and voting by mail;
• disseminated misinformation about voting, especially in poor or minority areas; and
• reduced voting resources (such as polling booths) in certain areas. 
• After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, over 850 voting centers closed, especially in the South, mostly in immigrant, minority, and other poor counties, leading to long voting lines and voters dropping out. 
• In Arizona the legislature prohibited people and organizations (like the League of Women Voters) from collecting other people’s ballots and handing them in.  This made it more difficult for people without transportation to vote.  The courts let the law stand.
• In the 2000 election, the state of Florida purged from their voting list all felons since they were not eligible to vote.  Unfortunately, their information was incomplete, so they also purged thousands of people with no criminal record based solely on things like having the same name as another person who was a felon or a similar address.  Since convicted felons are disproportionately people of color and poor, the improper purging removed thousands of voters who would have had been much more likely to vote Democratic. Bush won Florida (and thus the US presidential election) by less than 600 votes; without the purging, Gore would have been elected president.
• Other disincentives to voting include having voting day on a weekday and
• during business hours,
• not allowing automatic voter registration upon getting an official ID or
• refusing to allow same-day registration.
• Across the United State voting always takes place on a single day in the middle of the work day, mostly during workhours when blue- and pink-collar works are less able get time to vote.

As I mentioned in the last post, political gerrymandering has been used by both parties, although more broadly by Republicans.   Otherwise, voter suppression tactics exist mostly in Republican states (almost 2/3 of the states).  As in Florida in 2000, the impact on our democracy has been overwhelming.

We have become used to most of these tactics. But we should remember that they are yet another piece of a movement to prevent millions of people—most of whom are poor, minorities, or legal immigrants—from participating in our country’s selection of leaders, another direct attack on democracy in America.

Taking Their Votes Away - Part 1

The United States has a long and debasing history of disenfranchising entire classes of its people.  Most egregious, of course, were the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans and its long-term aftermath: Jim Crow, segregation, and most recently mass incarceration of African Americans.  But even at the very founding of our country, the vote was withheld not only from Native Americans and African Americans—both enslaved and free—but also from all women and white men who didn’t own land.

This is the first of two posts examining the United States’ different current uses of voter suppression.  In  this first post, I’ll look at:

1.    incarceration and the related felony disenfranchisement and
2.    gerrymandering

In the next post I will explore direct voter suppression.

Mass Incarceration and Felony Disenfranchisement

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed national legal obstacles to universal suffrage.  While the state Jim Crow laws were now no longer formally enforced,  however, their practices often remained.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, legislators found a new way of disenfranchising voters.  Lawmakers—both federal and state—began the process of mass incarceration, aimed disproportionately at people of color.  Between 1972 and 2010, the number of white people incarcerated grew from approximately 150 per 100,000 people in the population to 450 per 100,000, but for people of color the number increased from 500 per 100,000 to 2207 per 100,000.   The rate of black incarceration is thus more than five time the rate of white incarceration even though there is little difference in most crime rates.
After discharge from prison, the ex-offenders’ right to vote varies wildly from state to state.

1. Two states (Maine and Vermont) actually allow inmates to vote from prison. 
2. Fourteen states allow parolees to vote immediately upon discharge from prison. 
3. Twenty-one states prohibit felons from voting until the end of their parole. 
4. The other states don’t allow voting rights until after the entire sentence is completed and then require additional steps that are different from state-to-state.  Some of these conditions, such as a specific pardon from a governor, make restoration of voting rights highly unlikely … ever.

Since mass incarceration was intended primarily for the poor and especially people of color,  its impact is to disproportionately disenfranchise those same people, who are, not surprisingly, those who would vote primarily Democratic.

Gerrymandering
 
Gerrymandering is a method of drawing state voting districts to disadvantage some class(es) of people, usually members of a certain political party or color.  Although the Supreme Court has declared gerrymandering for racial reasons unconstitutional, in practice it still happens.  However, gerrymandering for political reasons is still considered constitutional.  It works like this:

• Every ten years the total population of the United States is divided by the number of seats in the House of Representatives to give the approximate number of people that should be in each congressional voting district, currently about 10,000. Districts are allotted to states based on their populations.  States then draw their own district boundaries for their allocation.  The residents of each district will elect one congressperson to the House of Representatives. So far all is fair.
• But states themselves draw the boundaries for each of their districts and the committees that determine boundaries are generally chosen by the majority party.  With a few exceptions, these committees determine the boundaries to the advantage of their parties, ie gerrymandering.  The following graph from the Washington Post offers a greatly simplified example of the process. 
• Let’s suppose you have a small state with fifty voters and five districts with ten voters each, four Red (40%) and six Blue (60%).  For simplicity’s sake, imagine that the districts are laid out as below. 

•     The simplest and fairest way to divide up the state into five district would to divide the voters by rows (see below).  The voters in each district would be completely Blue or Red.  The state would have 2 Red congresspeople and the Blue 3, exactly in proportion to their population.

• But if the Red controlled the state legislature, they could draw the boundaries as in the middle column where—despite being the minority—they would have 3 (60%) of the districts while the Blue would have only 2 (40%). 
• Or if the Blue controlled the legislature, they could divide the districts as in the right column giving them all of the districts and the Red none.
• Put simply, the idea is to pack as many voters from one party into one or two districts so that the other party can easily win the remaining districts.

Maryland’s Third District (in purple) is an extreme example of the extent to which a party will go to gerrymander the districts to their advantage.  In this case, the purple is all one mostly Democratic district.

While Democratic Maryland wins the prize for most bizarre gerrymandering, it’s the Republican gerrymandering that has the greatest impact on partisan voting.  Republicans win the gerrymandering battle by a large margin.  Gerrymandering is perhaps the most powerful method of reducing the impact of any person on an election.

What’s in the Next Post
 
In the next post I’ll look at other forms of overt suppression: voter ID laws, limiting voting times eliminating voting by mail, reducing resources in certain voting districts, and so on.