Opinion: Why I fear Indiana, not Kansas, charts the future of abortion rights in America - Marcus

[question everything]

(snip)

The important — and telling — difference is that Kansas involved a statewide referendum by the voters and turnout was huge while Indiana was a law passed by a legislature heavily gerrymandered to enhance Republicans’ partisan advantage. Consider: Republicans generally receive 56 percent of the statewide vote in Indiana, yet the state legislature is even more tilted toward the GOP, whose members hold 39 of 50 Senate seats and 71 of 100 seats in the House. This kind of partisan gerrymandering isn’t unique to Indiana — it’s endemic, and it turns the notion of returning abortion rights to the states into a cruel joke. When the democratic process isn’t democratic — when, by manipulating district boundaries to their advantage, one party gets to choose its voters — democracy becomes an illusion.

We arrived at this perilous condition thanks in large part to the Supreme Court, which announced three years ago that federal courts would not intervene to police partisan gerrymandering. “Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” the court proclaimed in its 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019. “But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ … does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.”

So the very court that issued paeans to democracy in Dobbs — “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” proclaimed Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — enabled the kind of manipulation that ensures “the people’s elected representatives” do not represent them at all. It’s a bit much to stomach conservative justices’ complaints that Roe “short-circuited the democratic process” when they enabled the subversion of the democratic process in Rucho. Nice work, justices.

(snip)

The real problem is elsewhere, about 16 states, where Grumbach and Warshaw found “big differences between what the people … want and the laws that their legislatures have adopted.” There — thanks to partisan redistricting — the views of the majority won’t matter.

More..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/08/post-roe-abortion-indiana-kansas

[MuseRider]

1. If this had been put directly in the hands

of our legislature here we would have lost by a HUGE margin here in Kansas.

[Phoenix61]

2. Every single sitting member was elected when abortion

was legal. They could say whatever they wanted and it didn’t matter. It does now and I think we’ll see that in the upcoming elections.

[Freddie]

3. Welcome to Pennsylvania

Where the ridiculously gerrymandered state legislature is blood red, yet somehow we have a Democratic Governor and it’s quite likely we’ll elect another one in Nov.

[kevink077]

4. Kansas voters

Overall many republicans in Kansas are business chamber of commerce types who don’t care about social issues and also many who are libertarian like. Indiana’s republican base is more like West Virginia’s. As in big MAGA… ..

[dalton99a]

5. Kick