While Trump is objecting to Jack Smith’s efforts to take his immunity appeal directly to SCOTUS - preferring to run through the appellant court first - Smith also ask said appellant court to fast-track Trump’s appeal.
It seems that the courts - Judge Cannon notwithstanding - are done with Trump’s delay tactics. The DC appeals court has mandated that all filings in the appeal be made by Jan 2 and the oral arguments will be on Jan 9.
Given the mounting workload on short deadlines, it’s going to be a very unhappy holidays for Trump’s lawyers.
Why are you people worried about what goes in a meat and cheese sandwich in Philadelphia? Pile on the peppers. Add mushrooms. Add mayonnaise and ketchup. Toss in some batteries. You’d think you were Phillies fans.
A while back, NY started the process to unfuck its congressional districts that cost the Dems more than enough seats to flip the House (regardless of George Santos).
Now Wisconsin has followed suit. I’m not talking about gerrymandering the other way, just a fair redistricting that removes GOP gerrymandering.
Wisconsin is a battleground state only for statewide offices. Last go around, the GOP took less than 50% of the vote statewide, but this yielded a 2/3rds majority in the state House, a supermajority in the state Senate and 8 out of 10 of the state’s U.S. House seats.
A red wave notwithstanding - something that hasn’t been seen since 2010 - the GOP will find it very difficult to hold onto their wager-thin House majority.
If I were Illinois or New York I’d make it a state felony for any public official to assist in bringing migrants into the state without proper provision for their welfare.
The reporting I heard indicated that only the state districts would be changed. Still a good thing for democracy but I assume it will take more time, effort and lawsuits to fix the congressional maps.
Also, hilarious to hear Wisky Republicans scream bloody murder over the end of a system where they have approximately 50% of the vote and yet have 66% of the state seats.
Here’s something I uncovered recently that I am still trying to wrap my mind around, after now two plus decades of gerrymandering hostility. It could all be undone by a simple law. The constitutional mandate that districts be reasonably-shaped was abolished by Republicans in the late 1930s after an inability to reapportion from a census that would have led to a significant watering down of rural power at the expense of cities. This also capped the size of the House of Representatives at 430.
When he was president, George Washington’s only veto was of legislation that would have expanded the average populous of a congressional district to over 30,000. The og founder thought it of exceptional importance that that number stay at the (then) constitutionally mandated 30,000. Today that number is well over 700,000. America’s is the third least representative representative democracy in the world.
It’s puzzling to me that this hasn’t been a cause celebre for the dems the few times they’ve had the capacity to pass laws over the past twenty years. As I understand it, one piece of law could effectively abolish gerrymandering. I know there’s more to it than that, but when you think about the infrastructural issues that lead us to minoritarian rule, this is some pretty fucking low-hanging fruit.
Federal law could cut through all this bullshit. Same argument for expanding SCOTUS: the health and politics of each justice would be less important - and thus seats far less valuable - if there were more of them.
Don’t get me started on the same number of senators each for New York, Texas and California as there are for Rhode Island or the Dakotas.
Yeah, the size of the senate is a tougher nut to crack, as that actually is mandated by the constitution.
One interesting proposal I’ve read about for adjusting the size of the House (which I am for) is called the Wyoming Rule. You take the state with the smallest population and make that number the base unit for congressional representation. (This is based on a model they use in New Zealand.) So Wyoming would get one representative, and California would get one per Wyoming unit of Californians. Which would translate to, roughly, 67.
This would also have the effect of significantly adjusting the Electoral College while sidestepping needing to amend the constitution to do so, since the number of electoral votes apportioned to each state is slaved (pun intended) to the size of that state’s congressional delegation.