Is the Republican Party a Threat to Our Representative Democracy?

[MarkD]

Watching the blue avatars contort themselves in response to SCOTUS's gerrymandering decision has been instructive on this count. By no means can the districts drawn in places like North Carolina, where a <50% vote share in the state leads to 10-3 seat distributions for Republicans, be considered in line with a functioning representative democracy. And they don't care.

Well, the job of SCOTUS is to interpret the Constitution, and seeing as congress hasn't put any amendments or laws on the books to justify the courts taking action, it's hardly their fault. But I suppose you'd rather have nine unelected men and women make decisions like this with no legal justification or legislation to back them up.

When litigating parties and judges are looking at state or local laws they do not like and deem those laws to be unfair, it is a matter of habit and routine to say that those laws violate either the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or both). A gerrymandered map drawn by Republicans which is unfair to Democrats violates the Equal Protection Clause, they say. The DP Clause and the EP Clause are the most frequently litigated parts of the Constitution and are the source of most judicial activism. Inversely, if judges do like the challenged laws, or see nothing unfair about them, then they uphold them, rejecting the challenge that said laws violate either of those clauses. There's lots of ambiguity in this sentence, ....

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I think that the DP Clause does not actually have any ambiguity in it, nor was it intended to mean anything more than what it says, but the Supreme Court has managed to make it have an ambiguous meaning anyway. Be that as it may, I'm sick and tired of the Supreme Court striking down laws they deem to be unfair, with their subjective standards, which is why I want to adopt an amendment that rewrites that sentence to make its meaning narrower and clearer.

BTW, I don't understand why the article posted in the OP did not mention the threat to democracy that was perpetrated by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, which is, to me, the worst thing that any Republicans have ever done to our democratic republic.

[MarkD]

Watching the blue avatars contort themselves in response to SCOTUS's gerrymandering decision has been instructive on this count. By no means can the districts drawn in places like North Carolina, where a <50% vote share in the state leads to 10-3 seat distributions for Republicans, be considered in line with a functioning representative democracy. And they don't care.

Well, the job of SCOTUS is to interpret the Constitution, and seeing as congress hasn't put any amendments or laws on the books to justify the courts taking action, it's hardly their fault. But I suppose you'd rather have nine unelected men and women make decisions like this with no legal justification or legislation to back them up.

When litigating parties and judges are looking at state or local laws they do not like and deem those laws to be unfair, it is a matter of habit and routine to say that those laws violate either the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or both). A gerrymandered map drawn by Republicans which is unfair to Democrats violates the Equal Protection Clause, they say. The DP Clause and the EP Clause are the most frequently litigated parts of the Constitution and are the source of most judicial activism. Inversely, if judges do like the challenged laws, or see nothing unfair about them, then they uphold them, rejecting the challenge that said laws violate either of those clauses. There's lots of ambiguity in this sentence, ....

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I think that the DP Clause does not actually have any ambiguity in it, nor was it intended to mean anything more than what it says, but the Supreme Court has managed to make it have an ambiguous meaning anyway. Be that as it may, I'm sick and tired of the Supreme Court striking down laws they deem to be unfair, with their subjective standards, which is why I want to adopt an amendment that rewrites that sentence to make its meaning narrower and clearer.

BTW, I don't understand why the article posted in the OP did not mention the threat to democracy that was perpetrated by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, which is, to me, the worst thing that any Republicans have ever done to our democratic republic.

I absolutely agree. Vague laws/legislation are great for authoritarians because they can be subjectively enforced. I would also support new amendments that clear up the wording in old ones, but because this would probably require the chaos of a constitutional convention, it's never going to happen.

Never say never. The people promoting this movement would dispute they are summoning a "constitutional convention," and that the convention they are summoning is going to be chaotic. The Convention of States Project has already sponsored a mock convention -- they called it a "simulated convention" -- and it went off smoothly, according to plans.