Republicans deploy a nasty bait-and-switch to save one of their worst gerrymanders
Why worry about the law when you control the courts?
Ian Millhiser
Jul 30, 2019, 12:16 pm
The state of Michigan does not hold free and fair legislative elections. In 2018, Democratic state house and senate candidates received tens of thousands more votes than their Republican counterparts. Yet Republicans have solid majorities in both houses.
Meanwhile, the state’s congressional districts are so aggressively gerrymandered that, in 2012, when President Obama won the state by over nine points, Republicans still captured nine of Michigan’s 14 U.S. House seats.
All of this is supposed to change, however, and soon. In 2018, voters approved a state constitutional amendment providing that future legislative maps will be drawn by an independent commission. The members of this commission are chosen largely at random from a pool of applicants, in order to minimize either party’s ability to capture the commission. People who recently served as partisan officials, party leaders, lobbyists, or other forms of political insiders may not serve on this commission.
That is, of course, unless the Republican Party gets its way in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday. The case is Daunt v. Benson.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-republicans-plan-to-keep-michigan-gerrymandered-ef3d2ca94270/