January 11, 2018
Amid all of the furor over Trump’s contradictory statements during his televised meeting with Congressional leaders to discuss DACA and immigration more broadly, two critical legal developments that strike at the heart of our democracy may have escaped notice.
First, on Tuesday, a federal appellate court struck down North Carolina’s gerrymandered Congressional districts on the grounds that they violated the Constitutional rights of the voters of that state. In a 191 page opinion, the three judge panel found that the gerrymandered maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law by depriving non-Republican voters of the value of their votes and the First Amendment rights of those voters because the deprivation was based on their “previous political expression,” (Source: “Federal Court voids North Carolina’s GOP drawn Congressional map for partisan gerrymandering,” by Fred Barbash, The Washington Post, 1/10/18). The record in the case includes express statements by the Republicans in charge of the redistricting process that they sought to draw maps that would create 10 Republican districts and 3 Democratic ones, despite the fact that Republicans are only 30% of the registered voters in North Carolina! (Source: “North Carolina Congressional districts struck down as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders,” by Anne Blythe, The News and Observer, 1/9/18). Continue reading “The Right to Vote: Use it or lose it?”